Elixir Programming

Welcome,

Elixir is a dynamic, functional language for building scalable and maintainable applications. The goal of this course is to give you practical examples for the building blocks of this language, we will go through all the features of the language. By the end of this course you will be able to create your own applications with ease. We will create a logger machine, a small command line application and many more, which comes in handy during your actual job.

Elixir runs on the Erlang VM, known for creating low-latency, distributed, and fault-tolerant systems. These capabilities and Elixir tooling allow developers to be productive in several domains, such as web development, embedded software, data pipelines, and multimedia processing, across a wide range of industries.

Scalability

All Elixir code runs inside lightweight threads of execution (called processes) that are isolated and exchange information via messages. Due to their lightweight nature, it is not uncommon to have hundreds of thousands of processes running concurrently in the same machine. Isolation allows processes to be garbage collected independently, reducing system-wide pauses, and using all machine resources as efficiently as possible (vertical scaling).

Processes are also able to communicate with other processes running on different machines in the same network. This provides the foundation for distribution, allowing developers to coordinate work across multiple nodes (horizontal scaling).

Fault-tolerance

The unavoidable truth about software running in production is that things will go wrong. Even more when we take network, file systems, and other third-party resources into account.

To cope with failures, Elixir provides supervisors which describe how to restart parts of your system when things go awry, going back to a known initial state that is guaranteed to work.

Functional programming

Functional programming promotes a coding style that helps developers write code that is short, concise, and maintainable. For example, pattern matching allows developers to easily destructure data and access its contents.

Happy Coding!