As a rails developer primarily, and someone dabbling with Elixir/Phoenix on the side, I get this feeling, too. It's taken the best of rails, dropped the annoying parts (e.g.: weird pluralization stuff, magic connection between instance variables in controllers and views, an explosion of path helpers (Phoenix's approach is basically post_path(:index), post_path(:show, 5), etc.)), and then put it on the rock solid Erlang VM.<p>I remember hearing the "genesis story" of Elixir. IIRC, José was working on ensuring Rails was thread safe. He did so, but was dismayed with the difficulty and felt like he was fighting Ruby. So he stepped back, and thought that if concurrency is the future, he should find a better language for it. He looked into immutable, functional languages (Haskell, Clojure, Erlang), and realized that Erlang is built for an arguably harder problem: distributed computing, and made the connection that concurrency is sort of a smaller case of that. He worked with Erlang for awhile before deciding that it could be improved by building on it.<p>Going through the Elixir tutorial and seeing how you could "simulate" state, by spinning up an infinite loop in another process and sending messages to it was mind bending. And learning about Erlang's OTP principles has made me really think about robustness differently. I really do hope Elixir/Phoenix become the next big language and web framework.