If you think functional languages are a big pain in the rear, but you still need the tools for building concurrent applications and multicore programs, then Elixir is for you. Claudio Ortolina introduces you to Elixir, the best of both worlds: Ruby’s unrivaled syntactic beauty with the power of Erlang’s semantics. Combining the best features of Ruby and Erlang with brilliant ideas of its own, Elixir might just change the way you write software forever.
Elixir is a dynamic language with a flexible syntax and macro support. It is built on top of the Erlang VM, an unrivaled environment for massive scalability, concurrency, distribution, and fault tolerance. It comes with built-in support for metaprogramming and provides first-class support for pattern matching, polymorphism via protocols (similar to Clojure’s), aliases, and associative data structures (called dicts or hashes in other programming languages).
Claudio explores Elixir's concurrent programming by re-creating a minimal version of GenServer, one of the most important constructs from OTP, the concurrent programming framework included in Erlang and Elixir.
Prerequisite knowledge
Attendees should have a basic knowledge of sequential Elixir.
Materials or downloads needed in advance
Attendees need a laptop with recent versions of Erlang and Elixir installed.
Hands-on session talk: 100 minutes long, code heavy, practical session
Claudio works as Head of Elixir at Erlang Solutions Ltd. He's a software engineer with more than 5 years of commercial experience in complex web applications and apis, with expertise in Elixir, Ruby, Elm and JavaScript. He previously worked at New Bamboo Web Development Ltd. (now part of Thoughtbot Inc.) in London, UK.
