A close friend has been goading me to try out Elixir, so I decided to make it a 2016 goal of mine to get into Elixir and the Phoenix web framework.

I'm already familiar with functional programming. My first job after college was with a team that loved to use LINQ queries everywhere. Nowadays, I work with F# daily, and it's a language I am very fond of now. We rely on RabbitMQ for our message broker, and so I am already aware of the power and reliability of the Erlang VM.

After reading the first couple of chapters of Elixir in Action, I can already see a lot of similarities in style between this language and F#.

I got a little impatient and curious to see everything in action, especially with Phoenix. I’m following this site as a base for the blog you're reading now

Some comments so far:

I program on the Windows platform^*, even on my side projects (Android or Windows applications). And wow, Elixir is not very Windows-friendly. I had to install CMake to install Phoenix, I had some trouble with getting Spacemacs and Alchemist set up properly. It was a cumbersome process for an installation and setting up an IDE. I guess this comes in the territory of getting into a language in the early stages of its life.

I followed the guide and got a simple “blog” with POSTs to add and update comments. I’m not quite sure exactly what I was doing at all, but it was nice to get a feel for how code will be written in Elixir.

^*Feb 2018 edit: Wow, have times changed! I now develop on MacOS, with Debian/Linux as my production environment, and VS Code as my IDE. Also, I "took a break" for several months after this negative experience. I'm so glad that I gave it another try.