The Clojure way of doing things is mostly about composing different libraries for your needs. You will have a lot of small tools to work with, and comparing to Phoenix, doing even the easy things take more effort to write code. Phoenix gives you a full framework, bells whistles and all, but you have to work within the constraint of the framework.
If you are an inexperienced programmer, you might want to just stick to Rails or Django, tooling and standard are easier to learn from those frameworks, and their shortcoming aren't visible to you anyways.
If you just want to learn programming for fun, or at the start of your path trying to be the best programmer as you can be, Clojure is a valid option, but there will be a lot of head banging around the code.
Tldr; clojure = more exotic, weird but great features, you should be comfortable rolling things on your own, elixir/phoenix = more exotic rails, stick to rails if you just want to make a website.
RE: start of your path trying to be the best programmer as you can be
Thanks. Nicely put - that sums it up.
Back in the day - over 10 years ago - I was a hybrid designer who also coded up his own design (JS, Actionscript, PHP) but then focused more on design & product consulting. I want to build stuff again and I want to learn this craft properly and hence why I'm attracted to both Clojure and Erlang / Elixir.
I think it's important to choose good (virtual) mentors and Rich Hickey / the wider Clojure community and Joe Armstrong and the Erlang / Elixir community seem to be great communities with smart, thoughtful and considered people.
If you are an inexperienced programmer, you might want to just stick to Rails or Django, tooling and standard are easier to learn from those frameworks, and their shortcoming aren't visible to you anyways.
If you just want to learn programming for fun, or at the start of your path trying to be the best programmer as you can be, Clojure is a valid option, but there will be a lot of head banging around the code.
Tldr; clojure = more exotic, weird but great features, you should be comfortable rolling things on your own, elixir/phoenix = more exotic rails, stick to rails if you just want to make a website.