ElixirConf US 2019 and the future of Elixir

For those of you who aren't familiar with Elixir but are interested in the language, I compiled a little Resources section down below, feel free to get some inspiration from there! What's a better time to jump into Elixir? :)

As some of you may know, ElixirConf US 2019 is currently running over at Gaylord Rockies Resort, Colorado!

The best thing about it is, even though the conference is still running, the videos are already out, check them out over at YouTube! I think it's pretty amazing that the videos come out so quicky so people who aren't able to attend don't feel as left out :)

There are a plethora of interesting things that are happening and frankly I haven't even had time to go through all of them yet! Some of those are:

• Lumen, an alternative BEAM implementation implemented in Rust, designed for WebAssembly, although the main goal is not to replace BEAM, it does seem like it could eventually head there! (Side note, I think a Rust-based VM is pretty exciting, just like what Enigma is trying to do.)

• Elixir's Future (Stability + Extensibility, better deployment experience, better tooling experience like tools to help aid Code Analysis, ExUnit now diffs for pattern matching as well)

Just thought we could start a conversation here on dev.to, otherwise, the Elixir community is also on elixirforum.com and also very active on the Slack channel over at https://elixir-slackin.herokuapp.com, join us!

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Resources

If you're new to Elixir, here are some great resources to get you started:

• The official Elixir website
• ElixirSchool, a community-driven website to help make Elixir easily accessible!
• The amazing books, Programming Elixir by Dave Thomas and also Elixir in Action by Sas̄a Jurić
• My personal favourite, Elixir and the OTP, video-based tutorial from Pragmatic Studio. I basically learned my Elixir crafts from here!
• Other video resources like ElixirCasts and Alchemist Camp are also great!
• If you're into podcast, I'm a big fan of Elixir Talk, they're perfect for your commute so definitely check them out!

P.S: With courtesy from ElixirForum (probably the biggest Elixir community forum?), you can sometimes get up to 40% off the learning resources! Just try to input elixirforum whenever you try to checkout :)

Comments

[Francisco Quintero 🇨🇴]

I'm planning to start studying Elixir in October. I'm a Ruby on Rails developer and Elixir looks like the ideal language to complement my toolset.

An ex coworker gifted me an Elixir book(the one Dave Thomas wrote), I've peeked it a couple of times and the concepts and features of the language are very interesting.

Thanks for sharing!

[Edison Yap]

It is very interesting! I got drawn to it by the concurrency nature, then once I started learning I fell in love with every other part of the language

• functional paradigm is great, love that there's no instance variables that could get altered from god knows
• the language is soooo extensible, Ruby is pretty great at it and I've utilised it a few times, but Elixir does it without any run-time cost and is much better because you get direct access to the AST
• toolings are great, Elixir-LS in VSCode is instant feed back, mix is great, iex is great, docs are amazing (and directly accessible in iex!)
• the language is so well thought out and lean, there's only very little core of the language, everything else is built upon it by the features it exposes (macros), what is usually a keyword in other languages is just a normal macro in Elixir!
• once you dive deeper into it there's so much more, the entire OTP system is astounding, it amazes me that 30 years ago they are able to solve problems that we are having today, things like high availability, distributed systems, and even interesting unique feature like hot upgrade!

All in all I am really enjoying my time with Elixir and I hope you do tool, good luck man :D

[Francisco Quintero 🇨🇴]

You make it sound even better! Can't wait to get started learning Elixir 😎

[Krystyna]

Totally agree with the others in comments and need to say, ❤️ Elixir is beautiful!

I'm a junior RoR dev and really a noob in engineering as I switched from product & marketing in IT two years ago. learned Python, PostgreSQL, Ruby, JS, and everything else...

This year I accidentally got introduced and fallen in love with Elixir. Since then have studied it on Exercism, have watched anything and everything I could get like podcasts or conferences with José Valim, Rob Martin and the others...

SO really appreciate the list of resources, that is very actual 🙏