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> Elixir is a niche dialect of a niche language (Erlang).

Nitpick: Elixir is not a dialect of Erlang. It doesn't even compile to Erlang, but directly to the BEAM bytecode.

Erlang and Elixir are very different languages. Think of it as Java and Groovy. Erlang is old, battle-tested, explicit and verbose to a fault (which stops being a fault when you try to maintain a decade+ old code) and is used mainly for writing large systems with very specific requirements. Elixir is younger, tries to be less verbose, adds magic completely absent from Erlang, and is intended to be used more like a traditional scripting language in addition to also covering the Erlang use case.



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