I second this recommendation: I've started a project with Elixir two weeks ago, and so far I really love it. As far as syntax goes nothing beats the elegance of Python, but in terms of overall application architecture OTP [1] is just miles ahead.

That said I can definitely imagine picking up Elixir for a purely imperative/OOP programmer being quite an undertaking. But definitely worth it.

[1] http://www.erlang.org/doc/design_principles/users_guide.html