A Ruby Developer’s Adventures in Elixir

This is a lighthearted write-up of my experiences learning Elixir coming from a Ruby background.

It all began early last year. A co-worker was talking about this programming language called Elixir, and a bunch of cool things it did .

I had never heard of it, but it sounded very exciting so I decided to read up. I was eventually lead down a learning adventure over the past year.

It has been my introduction to the Functional Programming paradigm. It taught me to think about code in a different way, and expand my understanding about programming.

Starting from the “beginning”

I have always preferred to learn when a problem was simply thrown at me. Learning came as a side-effect of trial-and-error aimed to solve a problem. That’s where I made my first error.

I started from the middle. I setup a simple application with Phoenix and tried hacking together a small app. Nothing made sense and the code was behaving in very strange ways.

I was really confused, and although I could hack a few things together after much Googling around I had so many unanswered questions!

Feeling a tad daunted by the whole ordeal, I felt the need to go back to basics. I wanted to understand what I was hacking…