It's also worth noting that, VocaLink, one of the well-known payment systems company do use Erlang for their products. I have also seen that Visa/Mastercard has been looking for Erlang developers as well.
But Erlang and Elixir are not the same thing. Erlang is proven in a major way thanks to telecom industry. That they both use the same VM is not enough.
Erlang and Elixir are way more "the same thing" than, for example, Java and Clojure are. The summary that "they both run on the same VM" is very general and elides a lot of details.
Elixir, on the one hand, is a new library and tool ecosystem. It's hard to compare libraries, but tool-wise, Elixir wins simply because it has them. Erlang has been underdeveloped in this aspect for years and it's not changing very fast.
Syntax wise they are pretty different, but it's trivial to use Erlang libraries from Elixir (not as easy and not always possible the other way around) and there's not feel that they're designed with different principles or feel foreign. Moreover, some standard Elixir APIs are simply old Erlang libs dressed up in slightly better clothes.
On the other hand, it's just the syntax which differentiates Elixir (the language, not the ecosystem) and Erlang. Only the compiler frontend is new in Elixir, from a certain point (an Erlang abstract syntax tree) it's Erlang all the way down to the bytecode/VM-executable code level.
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It's also worth noting that, VocaLink, one of the well-known payment systems company do use Erlang for their products. I have also seen that Visa/Mastercard has been looking for Erlang developers as well.
But Erlang and Elixir are not the same thing. Erlang is proven in a major way thanks to telecom industry. That they both use the same VM is not enough.
Erlang and Elixir are way more "the same thing" than, for example, Java and Clojure are. The summary that "they both run on the same VM" is very general and elides a lot of details.
Elixir, on the one hand, is a new library and tool ecosystem. It's hard to compare libraries, but tool-wise, Elixir wins simply because it has them. Erlang has been underdeveloped in this aspect for years and it's not changing very fast.
Syntax wise they are pretty different, but it's trivial to use Erlang libraries from Elixir (not as easy and not always possible the other way around) and there's not feel that they're designed with different principles or feel foreign. Moreover, some standard Elixir APIs are simply old Erlang libs dressed up in slightly better clothes.
On the other hand, it's just the syntax which differentiates Elixir (the language, not the ecosystem) and Erlang. Only the compiler frontend is new in Elixir, from a certain point (an Erlang abstract syntax tree) it's Erlang all the way down to the bytecode/VM-executable code level.
I'm not disagreeing. It was meant as a note that Erlang on the other hand is already being used in production environment in banking industry.
But Erlang has been in production use for decades. It's not a new language nor a fad.