I found that my JS experience made a lot of Elixir feel very familiar (lambdas, destructuring, default args, string interpolation, optional typing).<p>And compared to Node, the BEAM is a godsend in terms of its non-blocking process scheduling and fault isolation. A single uncaught exception in Node and kaboom. Plus, if you do anything cpu intensive with Node, your app stalls. In the BEAM, infinite loops are even fine due to time slice scheduling.