Intro

What is Elixir?

• Elixir is a dynamic programming language built on top of the Erlang VM...it compiles to Erlang byte code
• Syntactically it is a bit different from Erlang, sharing similarities with other languages, such as Ruby
• It is a functional programming language

Why Elixir?

• While relatively new, being that's it built on Erlang (around since the '80s), it's been battle-tested
• Concurrency
• Functional and immutability
• It's own package management system (Hex: https://hex.pm/)
• An easy to use build tool (Mix)
• Popularity is growing....i.e. more users and support

Concurrency

• Lightweight processes can be spun up with ease
  • each one gets a pid
  • utilizes Erlang scheduler
• Programs can be deployed as sets of processes
• Pass messages

# Define a module
defmodule Messenger do
    def ping do
        receive do
            msg -> IO.puts("Received #{msg}")
            # Invoke it here recursively to keep it up
            ping()
        end
    end
end

# Create a process with spawn/3
my_pid = spawn(Messenger, :ping, [])

# Send a message
send(my_pid, "Hello")

Functional

• Immutability makes programs easier to reason and can prevent issues with concurrency
• Example, using pipeline operator, makes composing chained functions simple

# Example of function using the pipeline operator (|>)

"HelloWorld" |> String.upcase |> String.split_at(5) |> Tuple.to_list |> List.last

## WORLD

Further Resources

Web Framework

Phoenix