Last time I tried Elixir it had some rough edges where you had to use some other ugly-ass language (I think it was Erlang?) to do some things. I immediately stopped learning after that. It feels like before learning Elixir, you need to learn Erlang, and I was just too lazy. Kind of using Clojure. You don't NEED to, but knowing Java helps. A lot. You need to learn the ecosystem, standard library, etc. You don't just pull a banana, you pull the gorilla holding the banana.