Yeah, it's like Lisp macros. Actually, Elixir code is AST+sugar as https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/syntax-reference.html shows.

It's actually Erlang with Ruby-like syntax.

It's 5M Concurrent Users. And Google-size services can't be built with just a language. It needs much more work to do.

I just wonder what's it's design goals in the future. I noticed that Elixir team seems working hard on something like GenStage and so on.