@marcusjwhelan A port is treated from the Elixir/Erlang side as a process. This means you can send messages to them, and also receive messages from them. There exist slightly higher-level wrappers like ErlPort, that expose an API to call any exposed functions directly from the other language.
Setting up a connection between Elixir and Python using ErlPort is very easy (I did it before to call into some NLTK-stuff in Python from Elixir), and probably the direction you’d want to take. 
