Getting into Elixir?!

After some years with Ruby and, to a lesser extent, Python, with bits of JS in between, I am considering what is next. High on the list for me are Elixir and Go. So far, I have not made significant progress with either of the two, but I hope that will change in the coming months. My first attempt at learning Elixir, I gave up rather quite quickly, after going through a couple steps on the Language website. Now I am counting on trying some other resources and on the power of social facilitation to make more progress this time around. 😉

Why Elixir?

First, let’s take a step back and pull a Sinek, to see why it might be a good idea to start learning Elixir now:

  • While production usage is still somewhat rare, things are looking up for the language and it is building on top of the Erlang VM, i.e. solid proven (Swedish) technology that is the basis of WhatsApp and some critical parts of mobile network infrastructure.
  • More Elixir jobs are appearing and the top specialized job board is fairly active.
  • It is supposed to be easier to get into than some other functional programming languages, if you are coming from Ruby.
  • With Phoenix there is already a reasonably well-developed web dev framework around and a database wrapper with Ecto. (So you already have some important standard libs, which arguably were critical for the success of Ruby.)

How?

This part I am still figuring out right now. To be continued… 😉

Elixir in Berlin

If you are in Berlin and interested in learning the language, you should probably:

Stay tuned for more Elixir-related updates on this channel!