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"They are two very different languages."

Then you later mention "programmer happiness". And I think an emphasis on "programmer happiness" is exactly what Elixir and Ruby share, and is probably the reason Rubyists are drawn to Elixir.

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Elixir was literally written by a Rails core team member as a response to issues he had in working on enterprise Rails apps. The Phoenix framework as well was written by a long-time Rubyist, and the book they wrote together, Programming Phoenix, reads in places like a treatise on lessons learned from working with Rails.

So Rubyists (I myself have been one since 2011) are drawn to it because it essentially has been billed as a successor to Rails when you need to be concerned with highly concurrent, fault-tolerant, TDD-driven web apps. Most companies who have embraced it are former Rails shops... most devs who use it are former Rails devs.

Or because the syntax is directly inspired by Ruby.

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