What are the main benefits of Elixir compared to Clojure?

As they don’t run on the same virtual machine, You should look at the tradeoff they provide.

For a good definition of the BEAM, You can read the following post.

Erlang and Elixir (and likely any BEAM language) give you:

1. 99% transparent parallelism and concurrency. I can’t stress enough how important this is and how I spent 15 years of my career trying to emulate this trait in at least 5 other languages (and failed like everyone else who tried the same).
2. Lag-less operation: spawn 50_000 tasks and the runtime will give them all a fair treatment for as much as the hardware allows.
3. Pre-emptive scheduling. No single task can slow down the others.
4. Ability to structure your software as a tree of tasks and supervisors, with the supervisors restarting tasks if they fail. The so-called fault tolerance. This is EXTREMELY underrated and people usually come looking for this in Erlang and Elixir after suffering in other ecosystems for a long time. I haven’t met a single new programmer who is able to appreciate how much of a productivity boost and a reducer of stress this feature is but oh well, what can you do.
5. Elixir-specific: macros. Basically code generators at compile time. Another vastly underrated productivity booster.

While other 30-year old languages like OCaml are still struggling to even produce a working multithreaded runtime (hope it doesn’t take them another decade to make an actor runtime!), and others like Rust are just now laying the foundations of a solid asynchronous multicore runtime (and Go never being that impressive in that regard to begin with), Erlang has been enjoying a multicore pre-emptive runtime for 20+ years, long before mainstream multicore CPUs even existed.

Many programmers underestimate these aspects, to their peril.

Elixir is one of the secret weapons in the programming area.

I respect Clojure and it was a strong influence on Elixir (more than Ruby IMHO). Here’s an old post I made in a related thread where I link to a document really comparing the JVM to the BEAM. It’s a great read. All sorts of little design tradeoffs were traded in different directions.

Clojure’s a darn nice language. It runs on the JVM.

No, really, that’s it. LOL the JVM might be an advantage or a disadvantage depending on your circumstances.

Elixir does not need 1 billion of parentheses.

The parentheses give you the simplest most consistent syntax. That Elixir is lacking them makes things more complicated.

Perhaps painfully obvious but I will go ahead and make the points that:
• Clojure uses a LISP syntax which would be an advantage for folks coming from the LISP world. (Hat tip to rvirding and LFE)
• Elixir uses a Ruby syntax which might benefit those coming from a Ruby background.

Tail call optimization is built into the Erlang VM - Clojure has to work around the JVM on that front (I suppose that’s just a difference not necessarily a benefit either way)

Clojure can take advantage of the full breadth of JVM based libraries - Elixir has a smaller-but-growing ecosystem. I’m not sure who the advantage is on that front because a lot of JVM based software seems pretty poor and finding the truffles among the dirt can be challenging.

Well in any case I find jvm patterns to be difficult to read and hard to understand.

Elixirs patterns are just like butter. Phoenix is hard to get into. It’s very opinionated about how to do things and I think the organic discoverability is low (I recommend getting a book or a course that will hold your hand through the basics) but I find that all of Phoenix’s opinions are sound and well-considered.

Jvm documentation quality is lower than elixir, and lots of “spinach things” like unit tests (and consequently refactoring ) are not as joyful, which means people do less of it.

Yep you can call functions in a mathematical way with no limits of arguments, and so on, but Sorry. I don’t like seeing a lot of them because it’s confusing (IMO). I know the power, but I prefer Elixir syntax. I think “makes things more complicated” is just a matter of opinion. I don’t like parentheses, you like parentheses. It’s fine.

At least opinions are not immutable so maybe one day you will start liking parens who knows