I don't get elixir, maybe I'm not ruby brained enough. Too much syntax sugar for me

Elixir is great from a syntax perspective. It gets compared to ruby a lot for some reason but they're nothing alike. Elixir syntax is very deliberate about everything.

The BEAM runtime is the real win. Your options are Erlang, Elixir and Gleam to get the BEAM.

Out of the 3, I prefer Elixir and Jose is a brilliant leader for it.