Elixir 101

Presented by Jeremy Swinarton @ Kinetic Cafe, May 19, 2016

Elixir is a modern, Ruby-like language that compiles to Erlang bytecode and runs on the Erlang VM. Elixir implements Erlang's concurrency model, which uses functional programming and an actor-like model, to achieve highly scalable, distributed, fault-tolerant systems.

Agenda

• What is concurrency?

  • How concurrency works: threads and locks

• Why should we care?

  • No more free lunch: the proliferation of multi-core systems

• History of Erlang and Elixir

• How Elixir works

  • Processes (the "actor-like" model)

  • Message passing

  • Functional programming

  • Pattern matching

Further reading

• Elixir: Getting Started

• Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks

• Programming Elixir 1.2

• Learn You Some Erlang For Great Good!

• The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software

• 30 Days of Elixir: A walkthrough the Elixir language in 30 exercises

• Awesome Elixir: A curated list of amazingly awesome Elixir and Erlang libraries, resources and shiny things