Yeah good point, Elixir is not just Erlang with a different syntax. It has streams, macros and a few other nice things. I believe Jose Valim likes to emphasise that point as well.

Now I personally prefer Erlang's syntax. I like that it is different because I know semantically stuff behaves differently. I would be more confused and disturbed by it if it looked like Java for example. I also like the immutable variables aspect..

However at the end of the day I am very happy to see Elixir grow. It really has one of the friendliest and most welcoming community. It will hopefully bring more people to the BEAM VM ecosystem.