Elixir IEX stalls before showing prompt, and doesn't accept input

I recently tried to start iex. I typed iex in the shell (I tried several shells, just in case) and iex doesn't provide any prompt or the like. It just sits there, and if I type special keys like arrows they are escaped and output. If i type control-c it shows me the standard beam interrupt. I checked that iex was pointing to the right place and not oddly aliased, and it seems to be correct. How do I go about troubleshooting this?

I've tried uninstalling and re-installing elixir (but not erlang yet), but that didn't fix it. Are there any cached files I can check or delete?

Solution

Ok, so turned out to be an erlang issue. After scouring my drive for erlang related files, I was able to get it to work after a re-install. Files I deleted before re-install:

~/.erlang.cookie (the most likely candidate. contained a string similar to this: "AMVBSKDKEI", sadly, I don't have the exact string anymore)
the cached home-brew bottles (unlikely, but deleted them just to be sure)
rabbit mq (maybe not the issue, but it was an erlang dependent package I had left installed previously)

/usr/share/file/magic/erlang looks to be part of file(1) and not erlang directly. Left that alone and got it to work.