"Elixir is a functional, meta-programming aware language built on top of the Erlang VM. It is a dynamic language with flexible syntax and macro support that leverages Erlang's abilities to build concurrent, distributed and fault-tolerant applications with hot code upgrades."
Erlang is a strange language: it is created for making distributed highly parallel systems that "never stop working", and it has syntax of Prolog that is very different from "usual" C-based languages.
Now, there is a new language that has more familiar syntax, and is running on same Erlang platform; and is liked by Joe Armstrong creator of Erlang,
and Dave Thomas, a legend of Agile and Pragmatic Programmer.
@ Wikipedia
Book
Systems that Run Forever Self-heal and Scale @ InfoQ
