What? Yes, Elixir's syntax is different, but it retains most of Erlang's semantics. And it's not hard to see that Clojure and Java are very different beasts, both syntactically and semantically.
I'm reminded of a talk by Rich Hickey in which he recounts his experiences trying to initially make Java more immutable. He concluded that while it was certainly possible, it was less than ideal and that a language such as Clojure facilitated expressing the semantics he wanted to convey. As a thought exercise, I would have you re-implement Spawngrid's mimetypes[1] library in Elixir to better understand what I mean. Email me at [email protected] and I can further elucidate.
mimetypes author & maintainer here. If I would ever have a tiny bit more time, I'd rewrite mimetypes in elixir in an instant. The solution we ended up doing in mimetypes, was the greatest fit for Elixir, not so much for Erlang (although, certainly possible — and it is being used by lots of Erlang developers).
Perhaps if you also view the issues Clojure addresses in Java to be mostly superficial, but I have to politely disagree.
> The language has its quirks, but that mostly fades once you're neck-deep in code.
Respectfully, I would argue that the quirks aren't made apparent until you're neck-deep in code. That's when it really becomes painful.