Painlessly functional and concurrent: An introduction to Elixir

Elixir is a functional programming language with a familiar syntax. Marc Sugiyama explores the basics of the language and explains why you want to use Elixir to write concurrent, scalable, and robust programs.

If you think functional languages are a big pain in the rear, but you still need the tools for building concurrent applications and multicore programs, then Elixir is for you. Marc Sugiyama introduces you to Elixir, the best of both worlds: Ruby’s unrivaled syntactic beauty with the power of Erlang’s semantics. Combining the best features of Ruby and Erlang with brilliant ideas of its own, Elixir might just change the way you write software forever. Elixir is a dynamic language with a flexible syntax based on Ruby and macro support. It is built on top of the Erlang VM, an unrivaled environment for massive scalability, concurrency, distribution, and fault tolerance. It comes with built-in support for metaprogramming and provides first-class support for pattern matching, polymorphism via protocols (similar to Clojure’s), aliases, and associative data structures (called dicts or hashes in other programming languages). Marc explores basic and sequential Elixir and concurrent programming and explains why you want to use Elixir to write concurrent, scalable, and robust programs.