A critique of "top programming languages to learn" articles. Argues that learning languages for career advancement benefits differ from personal learning, and that learning new concepts rather than just new syntax provides greater long-term value. Recommends learning functional programming concepts over new language syntax, with Clojure, F#, Elixir, and Elm as specific examples of languages worth exploring.

An exploration of Elixir, a functional programming language running on the Erlang VM. Discusses functional programming benefits for multi-core processing without thread safety issues, Erlang's role in enabling concurrent systems, actor model, pattern matching, and how Elixir builds on these foundations with modern syntax.