To be honest, I got very interested in Elixir myself. However, as I am trying to learn any Lisp, I am surprised LFE (Lisp for Erlang) or Joxa has not taken off, as the one thing missing from a lot of Lisp and Scheme languages seems to be a thread-based concurrency, specifically for multi-core processors having become ubiquitous.
"Why do Erlang and Elixir have the same 'semantics'? The reason has to do with the underlying machine. The garbage collection behavior, the non-shared concurrency model, the underlying error handling and code loading mechanism are identical. They must be identical: they run on the same VM. This is also why things like Scala and Akka will never be like Erlang. Scala and Akka run on the JVM so under the covers, things like garbage collection and code loading are fundamentally different." [0]
It goes without being said, but the choices the VM make will ultimately impact what is or is not possible for the languages on top of it. I have never taken the time to investigate JRuby or IronPython, but I have imagined this is a reason why few people love the original and VM-ported editions: one must assume Ruby code becomes less Ruby, Python less Pythonic, once moved to different VM architecture.
