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How come you havent noticed?! The number! 18! Come on, Ruby is on 2, Python struggles to get to 3 and Java tries to catch poorely with 8...

Random numbers (18 vs Python's 3 or Java's 8) don't mean anything without comparing the release cycles and version numbering schemes as well.

I could make small incremental updates to a toy language and release them every week to get to FooBarLang 200.0.0, that doesn't mean it's progressing faster than a language at release 2 or 10.

That's the joke.

Maybe add the /s then?

It's amazing how many people actually confuse version numbers this way, including on HN (check any discussion about semver).

Hacker News is serious business

That's not what I meant! It's that I've witnessed Erlang releases for quite a long time (as everyone), but the coming of Elixir (and me starting using it) made me care about them.

Two really nice enhancements are efficient large maps and being able to use variables as keys in maps.

Also switching to the Apache license will make adoption of Erlang/Elixir more possible for certain organizations.

Elixir also gets to reap any performance improvements at runtime and compilation.