> The ease of navigating an Elixir project is a huge benefit. If I want to know where a function is defined, it's very easy to find it. There's none of this class-reopening or meta programming malarkey that you get in Ruby (where is a Rails controller's render method defined exactly?)...

I would view Elixir as an improvement (iteration?) of Ruby built on Erlang. The article points out it was written by Jose Valim . It derives its structure from the documented shortcomings of both parent languages.