Elixir is a language with syntactical roots in Ruby. It also carries the Erlang legacy. Legacy used here as in "a great legacy" and not as in "system you don't like anymore". Ruby is an object-oriented language. Elixir is functional language. The Erlang part has an impact as Elixir was designed to provide strong interoperability with Erlang. Like Ruby and Erlang, Elixir is a high-level of abstraction and very dynamic language. Overall I would say the Elixir syntax is pretty approachable and reasonable to learn. Let's unpack it.