Indeed, it would be nice to have an EFL: Elixir Flavoured Lisp. (Lazy) Streams and clojure'ish protocols (lispy virtual methods) makes a big difference in abstraction. Erlang as it is, supports ADTs but not object abstraction (i.e. different kinds of set implementations with different implementation/representation) See http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2009/essay.pdf for discussion.