I work with elixir daily and I would concur. elixir's semantics line up nearly 1:1 with the clojure code I used to write a few years ago. Its basically if you replaced the lisp brackets with ruby like syntax. The end result is a language that is much easier to read and write on the daily with the disadvantage of making macros more difficult. I would argue that it should be difficult since you should avoid using it until absolutely necessary. Lisps on the other hand, practically beg you to use macros as the entire language is optimized for their use.