I think the Erlang question is misleading perhaps, because using erlang functions in elixir doesn't actually involve/require learning erlang... any erlang function is available to call directly from Elixir, generally just namespaced under an atom, like :crypto.block_decrypt(:aes_cbc256, key, iv, cipehrtext) You don't have to "know erlang", just read some docs and make a slightly different syntax function call.