I’m going to guess that maybe you (or they) meant “Elixir == Ruby”, because Elixir transforms into Erlang, and Ruby is interpreted by YARV, which is written in C, so they’re both a more developer-friendly syntax on top of a lower-level language.
I’ve encountered some what I would call “old school” programmers who think anything not written in C++ or C is too slow or trying to do too much for you. They’re knock on Ruby is kind of legitimate, because even with the increased speed of YARV, it’s still kind of slow. And if the first thing your coworkers heard about Elixir is that it’s like Ruby for Erlang, maybe they just assumed it has all the same shortcomings.
If they actually did say “Elixir == Rails”, well then, as other commenters have pointed out, that makes absolutely no sense.
