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Discussion on: What is the next language you want to learn, and why?

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Zeke Gabrielse

Elixir and Phoenix. I'm a huge Ruby/Rails fan and seeing Elixir/Phoenix resemble those makes me happy.

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Pystar

Can you learn Elixir without knowing Erlang?

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James Byrne 🏹

Absolutely, it's definitely a boon but far from a requirement

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Josh Burke

Well, you cannot use Elixir outside of the Erlang VM because it is required as part of the language. But you don't have to dive into Erlang and write it as part of your day to day. One thing you will find after writing a bit of Elixir is that Erlang becomes more approachable and understandable. Elixir just expands out to Erlang using macros, and then compiles to Erlang VM byte code to be executed by the VM.

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Ben Halpern

Yeah. Elixir doesn't really resemble Ruby as a language fundamentally, but the whole ecosystem was clearly designed to be friendly to the Ruby community's expectations.