For anyone who's interested in Elixir (or functional programming in general) but thinks it looks a bit daunting, check out Erlang.
It's a stable production language which has just turned 17.3, has extensive resources, and runs on its own VM (kind of like how Java runs on the JVM). This gives you all of the amazing concurrent power which has helped the Heroku guys here.
The reason I'm promoting elixir instead is because I feel that it's easier to pick up in terms of how different it is from imperative and OO languages.
While you are right in how Erlang has a much longer reputation, it's odd though how it hasn't gained much popularity like other languages that have been around for that long.
Three things that make the experience of developing in Elixir completely different from Erlang: Tooling, libraries, and actual language features (that aren't just skip deep).
Spend 5 minutes developing an app in Elixir and you'll realize why it's not just "only syntactically different" from Erlang.
Yes, but Elixir gives you some awesome things (on top of everything available in Erlang obviously) - macros, Ecto (LINQ for Postgres) and pipe operator are my top 3.
NB: I don't use it at work or anything, just read up on it during free time.
It's a stable production language which has just turned 17.3, has extensive resources, and runs on its own VM (kind of like how Java runs on the JVM). This gives you all of the amazing concurrent power which has helped the Heroku guys here.
Check it out!: http://erlang.org/