[xlii]

For serious apps it's impossible to escape reading Erlang or Erlang documentation. Many functions and libraries simply aren't available for Elixir or are partial (see `opentelemetry_*` family as an example). Deep debugging is almost exclusively done with Erlang functions.

I'd even say that the more serious/critical application becomes the more weight shifts toward Erlang. Personally I'd go with Erlang-first, but only because I've accumulated thousands paper cuts from Elixir.

For starters Elixir has much more palatable syntax, though.

[ch4s3]

> For serious apps it's impossible to escape reading Erlang or Erlang documentation

Erlang documentation yes, but I VERY RARELY look at Erlang code. The only times I've really done it have been fiddling with an ODBC driver issue, which isn't really supported anymore by OTP, a crash dump maybe twice, and writing a dialyzer wrapper. I've been building elixir systems for over 10 years, and use OTP heavily,

[haolez]

But beyond syntax, how does the tooling compare? It seems that Mix is very convenient and feels like similar tools in other languages. I'd imagine that Erlang doesn't have an equivalent.

[xlii]

Overall Elixir tooling has more modern feel to it, but often it wraps around Erlang tools but.

Keeping mind that Erlang exists much longer than Elixir tooling for Erlang is more robust and mature. BUT its tooling revolves around advanced features e.g. hot updates. For webdev Elixir's tooling is capable enough.