Show them this, then point out it was made 30 years ago on the BEAM…

Pattern matching in function signatures - i love it. Since i know this feature, every other language feels limited.

I find the quality of the docs, the docs generator, the compiler, and ExUnit very compelling. Not sure if that counts as “features” of the language but for a newbie, those tools make programming easier so you can focus on the hard part: algorithms.

Then I would ask why them are interested in programming and check if there is a good library/framework to start to do that.

Error isolation. Failure in one process doesn’t cause exit of other processes. So in example of Phoenix where each request is separate process, you do not need to much worry about error handling, as exception in one will not interfere with other requests running at the same time.

My favourite Elixir features are pattern matching, macros, and tooling (Mix, IEx, ExDoc, etc). I like to share this article: Elixir · How I Start. as it shows some language basics but more importantly supervision trees and distribution.