03 Nov 2015

Drink the Elixir

I’ve been playing with Elixir for a month now. Just on my spare time, but can’t stop thinking about how to use it on my projects.

Some years ago I saw a talk by Joe Armstrong, one of the parents of Erlang, and I inmediately purchased his book: Programming Erlang - Software for a Concurrent World.

It was a delight to be introduced to functional programming, pattern matching, message passing concurrency, etc. However I stumbled upon the crude reality: do I have any project which I can use Erlang? The answer unfortunetely was no. I was just moving from Windows desktop apps to simple CRUD Rails apps.

Fast forward a few years and I discover Elixir. A new language built on top of Erlang, which eases the rough edges and makes Erlang a joy to use, like Ruby.

I’m hooked, again. I watched most of the Elixir Conf videos and I bought Programming Erlang and Erlang In Action books. This time however, it might not only be a curious exploration, I might actually use this for real.

Ah! And it’s not just Elixir. A web framework has been developed in paralel with Elixir which feels as Rails (although is a different beast!): Phoenix.