The reason I ask is because Elixir seems to have all of the benefits of Erlang, and then adds plenty of its own. Hence I an genuinely curious why people are opting for Erlang over Elixir, I mean, could I be missing something?
This is an excellent post by the Erlangelist and why he recommends Elixir over Erlang: http://www.theerlangelist.com/2014/01/why-elixir.html
Haha! Iām reading it now. And I already agree with this statement:
By extension, I also like Erlang syntax, and actually think it is in many ways nicer and more elegant than Elixir.
Well Elixir is much more like Ruby than Erlang is, and most of us here are huge Ruby fans 
His post:
Before discussing some benefits of Elixir, there is an important thing Iād like to stress: Elixir is not Ruby for Erlang.
The end result may on surface look like Ruby, but I find it much more closer to Erlang, with both languages completely sharing the type system, and taking the same functional route.
I finished reading the post and the comments. I believe he wrote a fair and unbiased assessment; which is good. However; Elixir still does not interest me.
Guys seriously, you need to checkout Go and Clojure
Thatās good Dan, but it still doesnāt answer my question - why Erlang and not Elixir? Is it just personal preference or are there some other reasons?
Yes, Elixir is not Ruby, but it is much closer to Ruby than Erlang is as Elixir borrows heavily from Ruby (as Phoenix borrows a fair bit from Rails).
Go doesnāt interest me (I donāt like endless semi-colons and brackets in my code) Clojure seems cool tho, but neither have the power of the Erlang VM which I feel is a huge plus for many applications on the web.
If I wanted something like Go, I would look at Crystal 
@AstonJ Go is very young but Clojure is using JVM which can be awesome. Also there are lots of well tested Java library out there in the wild.
Why do you like Erlang VM so much ? what is special about it ( I like Elixir too )
The concurrency (and scalability) it offers, which I think is really important for bootstrapped startups who donāt want to go down the VC route.
I have to say tho, if it wasnāt for Elixir I probably wouldnāt have given Erlang much thought - I donāt consider myself to be a particularly bright programmer, so I need something as easy as Ruby 
Mind you I still havenāt started to learn it properly - it might be too hard for me 
Hmm I hate Java world, but the fact is JVM offers the same availability and performance and a lang like Clojure is too damn easy and sweet. And most important issue here is that Clojure and JRuby can be an awesome combination. ( With Torquebox and Immutant )
Have a watch of this regarding Clojure, Jruby, Java etc
They touch on the topic that most other languages still have to figure out what the Eralng guys figure out decades ago - it really is worth a watch.
Cool Iāll watch it definitely
There are other languages?
this benchmark looks interesting @AstonJ
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=erlang&lang2=clojure
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64q/compare.php?lang=go&lang2=clojure
Some good comments here about Clojure vs Elixir @lxsameer https://www.reddit.com/r/elixir/comments/33wanj/why_might_i_choose_elixir_over_clojure_for_a
I agree very much with this:
I would advise you to spend some time studying both, reading some code, and then deciding whats best for you.
Youāre going to spend a lot of time writing/reading the language, just make sure you are happy with it
Thatās exactly right, I thing the most important thing here is that which language fits well with your needs. For example obviously Ruby is lot slower than Erlang or Clojure but it has other good features that made us using it in our projects.
I thing all these are just tools which are meant to be used in the right place.
Iāve been playing with Erlang since before Elixir came out. For me, Elixir feels too much like Erlang to let me break off of wanting to use Erlang syntax.
Aston, Hereās a video that would have best suited promoting Elixir to Rubyists. By the author of the Pickaxe book Programming Ruby - Dave Thomas speaks on Elixir: The Power of Erlang, the Joy of Ruby Heās a respected author, authoritative on Ruby, and highly influential. People will listen.
Yeah, heās definitely a big influencer 
We have that video in the Elixir thread:
Odd, the video had the opposite effect for me as it did you. He used tail recursive methods which is a big win for me. And the multi-core methods he wrote so quickly has my mind spinning. Iām very curious about it. 
Oh, and because I havenāt been too interested in it I havenāt read the Elixir thread.