i do a lot of Erlang work - my consultancy - Inaka - has production apps in Erlang for Fortune 500 companies and startups - and I'm constantly looking for Erlang devs. Also, I have some ruby devs. I'm always trying to get the Ruby guys into Erlang but what I've found is that the concepts of Erlang are such that by the time you've learned the VM and processes, and atoms, and lists, and what a term is and what OTP is, you've got Erlang syntax down. So... I agree, I never actually have a need to teach Elixir. But, i REALLLY want it to work - it's a brilliant language and it's picking up where Reia left off - Reia is essentially dead now that (though not just because of the fact that) Tony works at Basho... so, I want to promote Elixir at the same time that I'm a huge potential user of it and don't (yet.).
My only thought about how Elixir could take off is if someone writes a killer web framework in Elixir and that starts meaning that the mixed apps we're always writing - Ruby on Rails web UI with an Erlang Web Services framework on the backend (that the iOS and Android apps are talking to) - could be just running inside the Erlang runtime. There would be no more need for that little piece of our deployment running Passenger - which is always the most fragile piece. That could do it.
i've used BERT and Ernie extensively and it's generally just easier to mix them using REST. But my point is we use Rails in some cases when we'd rather do everything in Erlang and (Mochiweb | Webmachine) because there's no good Erlang web framework, and I could see Elixir being the language foundation for that framework at some point.
My only thought about how Elixir could take off is if someone writes a killer web framework in Elixir and that starts meaning that the mixed apps we're always writing - Ruby on Rails web UI with an Erlang Web Services framework on the backend (that the iOS and Android apps are talking to) - could be just running inside the Erlang runtime. There would be no more need for that little piece of our deployment running Passenger - which is always the most fragile piece. That could do it.