one difference is that you can really afford to be lazy with elixir. If your pattern match fails, one option is to let it throw a MatchError. Especially if the failure is rare, you just let the process die and your supervisors will restart the process into a sane state, and hopefully the next time you hit the code path it will be ok (for example: you are calling out to a 3rd party web service and they have a brief service outage, or some backhoe went over a network link and killed your packets).