It’s exactly like older style PHP in the sense that you can build entire apps without having to do any object or data design. It’s all functions, like old style PHP.
Modern PHP of course uses objects and cleaner code liberally.
2) it’s a functional language. There are no objects. PHP doesn’t have guardrails for referential transparency or data immutability. These are first class concerns in a language that ergonomic to do functional programming in. PHP has never had these. It’s completely different and you are comparing apples to oranges.
My point was, sloppy programmers will be sloppy programmers. And if you are writing old school PHP where everything was a bunch of functions, it's even less of a cognitive shift to go to elixir, and you will write the same kind of sloppy code there too.
There's nothing special about elixir as a language that will prevent you from writing sloppy, unreadable code in the same style of PHP (as with other languages)
That being said, I'm hyped for 1.7 and will dive in later to work on a hobby project :)