Ask HN: Is Erlang an albatross to Elixir adoption?

I pose this question in all seriousness. An observation: after being an elixir developer for a few years now, and bringing new talent into the mix (no pun intended), is that it's a friction point for new devs learning Elixir when they invariably stumble across the things in erlang — libraries and the like. I'd hoped I could avoid it myself, but it's too interdependent.

The notion that to learn a language you also need to learn a second one is not great. Imagine people saying "cool, learn python, but oh, you also should brush up on cobol while you are at it, you know." It's just bizarre.

And before the vocal defenders kick in I want to clarify that the following response (which is what I usually hear) is NOT a valid response to the question being posed:

"Erlang is easy, it's just semantics that are different"

While this statement might be true, it doesn't address my point. That something is easy to do for one person is irrelevant to the fact it causes friction for new devs and may hinder adoption.

I think there are many amazing points to Elixir, and thanks to Erlang it has a lot of amazing roots. I know both communities are trying to make both co-exist well. But every time I come across an Erlang library, invariably the documentation is a nightmare (if it exists at all) and I have to read the code just to figure something out. This is true also of many system level things even in Erlang. The docs are horrific. Reading the code is NOT an answer.

I don't know what a solution is, but perhaps a concerted effort to create a documentation and library ecosystem that never links back to Erlang would help. And where there are critical systems that use an Erlang library, perhaps rebuilding it in Elixir is in order?

Flame away :) I ask the question because I'm curious how others feel about it, and I want to help promote more adoption of Elixir. (And hearing from ALL sides, not just defenders of the faith. What about people who've tried elixir and moved on?)

I feel like this is an issue with all superset languages or however you want to call them and should be taken into account by anyone learning one of these.

You can't really learn Elixir without also learning _some_ Erlang, you can't really learn TypeScript without learning some Javascript, you can't really learn Clojure without picking up some Java. The platform/base language is abstracted away to some extent but not completely.

It's especially visible when trying to use libraries used in the platform language.

> Erlang, on the other hand, offers me much that Elixir does not.

Genuinly curious. Like what?

Nice to meet you. I am completely un-Ruby Pythonista, and I like Elixir a lot.

I felt the same way as topic starter, and I invested couple months to make several tools Elixir-native -- the project was cancelled with the layoff.

I think, this is a compromise. I strongly dislike Erlang abstraction leak, but I understand the desire to deliver the language, and iterate on cleaning up toolchain & libraries later.

Although I also have issue w/the Elixir docs, they tend to have more explanations in them than the Erlang ones. Marginally :)

I am one who came not from Ruby, btw. My roots come from a variety of things including Smalltalk, C, C++, Perl (dare I admit), Java, Javascript and Python, among those most influential on my life (and in that order).

I'm really happy w/Elixir, finally getting back to a better true object oriented system (for those who know the roots of such).