RE: start of your path trying to be the best programmer as you can be
Thanks. Nicely put - that sums it up.
Back in the day - over 10 years ago - I was a hybrid designer who also coded up his own design (JS, Actionscript, PHP) but then focused more on design & product consulting. I want to build stuff again and I want to learn this craft properly and hence why I'm attracted to both Clojure and Erlang / Elixir.
I think it's important to choose good (virtual) mentors and Rich Hickey / the wider Clojure community and Joe Armstrong and the Erlang / Elixir community seem to be great communities with smart, thoughtful and considered people.
If you are an inexperienced programmer, you might want to just stick to Rails or Django, tooling and standard are easier to learn from those frameworks, and their shortcoming aren't visible to you anyways.
If you just want to learn programming for fun, or at the start of your path trying to be the best programmer as you can be, Clojure is a valid option, but there will be a lot of head banging around the code.
Tldr; clojure = more exotic, weird but great features, you should be comfortable rolling things on your own, elixir/phoenix = more exotic rails, stick to rails if you just want to make a website.