I was able to read Erlang before knowing the name of the language. I discovered this language by looking at the source code of RabbitMQ, and I was surprised at how I could read it, knowing nothing about the language.
At first I thought atoms were variables defined somewhere (and I did not care where it was defined, the names were explicit). When I learned that they are in fact values, it blew my mind.
It's only 6 months later I started coding in Erlang. Then 3 years ago I started writing Elixir. I did not have to learn Elixir in fact, it was just another syntax for what I already knew.
I always recommend learning Erlang first with https://learnyousomeerlang.com/ and then learning Elixir. Simply because this book does a far better job at explaining OTP than the Elixir docs.
Maybe there is some value in writing learnyousomeelixir.com?
When writing Elixir, yes, you'll be exposed to Erlang syntax/docs sooner or later. But you're not writing Erlang, so you never need to learn how to:
Creating something functional from scratch in a language is 100x (1000x?) more challenging than learning how to roughly read it.I've been programming full-time in Elixir for a couple years. All told, I think I spent 3-5 hours one afternoon learning the basics of Erlang's syntax so I could better read the docs. Haven't had to think about it consciously since.