Is that good or bad? I personally don't mind Erlang syntax at all or the syntax overhead to you have to write a gen_server that does nothing. Elixir saves you some of that overhead. It's kind of like CoffeeScript for Erlang. It's fully compatible since it compiles to Erlang AST which compiles to BEAM. You can do "everything" with Elixir you can do with Erlang. Of course, you have to understand how to work with Erlang/OTP to actually benefit.