How does the two languages compare when it comes to server side application development? Any experiences or ideas? Thank you.
You are asking this question in ElixirForum, so definitely the answer will be biased.
Elixir will be easier to learn, it doesn’t have too many ways to do anything like Scala does, and you won’t hate it the way you’ll hate Scala.
Edit: If you don’t know much about Elixir, please watch the following video. It will give you an overview about the history and the strengths of Erlang/Elixir.
From my experience in Scala
if you want to write functional code, you can’t do it directly in pure Scala and you must use some libraries like https://github.com/scalaz/scalaz or https://github.com/typelevel/cats. And syntax will be never so nice as in ML languages like F#, Haskell. And above that you need to fight with limitation of JVM
For those reasons if I will need to choose some static typed functional language I think I would go F#, OCaml, Haskell