The problems some people have with , , ; and . is truly amazing, and how worked up about it they can get. They spend more time writing blogs about how terrible they are than learning. It’s a strange world we live in.

I just think of them as operators, which they are.

, is a sequence operator (combine both sides to a single level sequence).
; is the expression operator (evaluate both sides and return the right).
. is the statement operator (evaluate both sides, no return, only makes sense in erlang between functions).

^.^

It actually quite bugs me when languages treat them as something that isn’t an operator, like lua or javascript or elixir does.

Like taking rust, ; is the same as in erlang, it’s the expression operator, evaluate left, then right, then return right. In Rust if you do something like blah ; blorp it returns whatever blorp returns, which also means returning it straight out of a function (last line doesn’t take a ; because it’s not a statement separator like in C++, it’s an expression operator).

Semantically Elixir and Erlang are very similar. So if you are thinking of learning Erlang in order to be “better” (whatever better would mean to you) at Elixir, it probably will not help all that much.

With that said, I would suggest at least understanding Erlang syntax. At some point in your Elixir career, you will most likely need to use an Erlang library for something. At which point, if you need to look into the code in order to debug something, it will very much help knowning Erlang.

Learning Erlang isn’t something you need to do from the very beginning. In fact in my personal opinion the best way to put it off is to learn Elixir via Elixir In Action 2e because in a very subtle way you are being prepared for the necessary aspects of the Erlang mindset.

I would also say that Erlang is easier to learn than Elixir provided you can get passed the ant turd tokens. Elixir adds value on top of that through hygienic macros.

Though my personal bias is that I have never been fond of Ruby’s syntax. In fact for people coming from Ruby it can be a bit of a familiarity trap.

A good free resource for learning Erlang is Learn You Some Erlang (it’s good even if you pay for it).

Also

is one of the best architectural books about the BEAM and OTP ecosystem

This page highlights syntax difference between Elixir and Erlang. It’s a nice start if You want to read code in both languages.