Distributed programming isn’t the only area Elixir excels. One of the less advertised strengths of erlang’s little brother is that it contains one of the most elegant and compact ways to define binary parsers in a programming language. Code visually represents data structures making it easy to match and extract bytes and even individual bits in the function heads themselves. This capability makes Elixir an unexpected front-runner for learning and prototyping binary protocols.

https://medium.com/@hansonkd/visual-programming-with-elixir-1bd7f865bf17?source=friends_link&sk=6f7b440eb04ee81679c3ddfede9bab07