My intro to Elixir: how learning another programming language can make you a better developer

As a full-stack developer, I‘ve spent the bulk of my career working with JavaScript, both on the front-end and back-end. It‘s a versatile language that I know inside and out. However, a couple years ago, I decided to make a concerted effort to learn a new language, specifically one that would expose me to new programming paradigms and ways of thinking. That language was Elixir.

Created by José Valim, Elixir is a dynamic, functional language built on top of the battle-tested Erlang virtual machine. It combines the high availability and fault-tolerance of Erlang with a more friendly and expressive syntax. Learning Elixir has not only added a powerful tool to my kit, but has made me an all-around better developer.

Why Learn Another Language?

You might be thinking, "I‘m already proficient in [insert language here]. Why should I bother learning another one?" It‘s a fair question. Becoming truly skilled in a programming language takes a lot of time and effort. However, I would argue that the benefits far outweigh the costs.

Each language has its own unique features, quirks, and best practices. By stepping outside your comfort zone and grappling with these differences, you‘re forced to think about problems in new ways. You start to see patterns and abstractions that carry over between languages. Concepts like types, concurrency, scope, and immutability become more tangible.

What‘s more, being multilingual makes you a more marketable and well-rounded developer. It shows that you can quickly adapt to new codebases and are open to using the best tool for the job, rather than just sticking with what you know.

Elixir‘s Superpowers

So what makes Elixir special? Why choose it as the next language to learn? Here are a few of the key strengths that drew me to Elixir:

Functional Programming

Elixir is a functional language, meaning it treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids changing state and mutable data. If you‘re coming from an imperative language like JavaScript, this can be a big mental shift.

In Elixir, you write short, focused functions that take input and produce output. These functions are combined and chained together to build your application. Let‘s look at a quick example:

defmodule StringUtils do
  def capitalize(text) do
    String.graphemes(text)
    |> Enum.map_reduce(true, fn
      char, true -> {String.upcase(char), false}
      char, false -> {char, false}
    end)
    |> elem(0)
    |> Enum.join("")
  end
end

StringUtils.capitalize("hello world!")  
#=> "Hello world!"

Here, the capitalize function takes a string, splits it into a list of graphemes (single-character strings), capitalizes the first character, then joins the list back into a string.

Notice the use of the pipe operator (|>), which passes the result of the previous expression as the first argument to the next function. This creates a clear chain of transformations that is easy to follow.

Immutability is another key tenet of functional programming. In Elixir, once a variable is bound to a value, that value cannot be changed. Any "modification" to a data structure actually returns a new data structure, leaving the original intact. This eliminates whole classes of bugs and makes it much easier to reason about the state of your program.

Concurrency

One of Elixir‘s greatest strengths is its support for concurrency. Thanks to the Erlang VM (BEAM), Elixir can spawn and manage thousands of lightweight processes, each with its own separate heap and garbage collector. These processes communicate via message passing, rather than shared memory, which eliminates many of the issues that plague concurrent programming in other languages.

What‘s more, Elixir provides simple but powerful primitives for working with processes. The spawn function creates a new process, send sends a message to a process, and receive allows a process to wait for and respond to messages.

defmodule Greeter do
  def hello(name) do
    send(self(), {:greet, name})

    receive do
      {:greet, name} -> IO.puts("Hello #{name}")
    end
  end
end

pid = spawn(Greeter, :hello, ["World!"])
#=> Hello World!

Here, spawn creates a new process that runs the hello function with the argument "World!". The process sends a message to itself and then waits to receive that message before printing the greeting.

This is just a taste of what‘s possible with Elixir‘s concurrency model. Tools like GenServer, Supervisor, and Agent allow you to build fault-tolerant, distributed systems that can scale to handle huge amounts of traffic and data.

Fault Tolerance

Related to its concurrency model, Elixir excels at building fault-tolerant systems. Processes are isolated from one another, so if one process crashes, it doesn‘t bring down the whole system. Supervisors can automatically restart failed processes, making it easy to build self-healing systems.

What‘s more, Elixir has a "let it crash" philosophy. Rather than trying to anticipate and handle every possible error condition, you design your processes to crash quickly when something goes wrong. The supervisor is responsible for restarting the process in a known good state. This leads to more reliable, error-free code.

Pattern Matching

Pattern matching is a powerful feature in Elixir that allows you to destructure data and bind variables based on the structure of that data. It‘s used everywhere from function arguments to control flow statements. Let‘s look at a quick example:

defmodule Math do
  def zero?(0), do: true
  def zero?(x) when is_integer(x), do: false
end

Math.zero?(0)  #=> true
Math.zero?(1)  #=> false
Math.zero?([1, 2])  
#=> ** (FunctionClauseError) no function clause matching in Math.zero?/1

Here, we define two clauses for the zero? function. The first clause matches when the argument is exactly 0. The second clause matches when the argument is any integer other than 0. If we pass a non-integer argument, no clause matches and we get an error.

Pattern matching allows us to concisely define function behavior based on the shape of the data we‘re working with. It also enables powerful control flow constructs like case and cond.

Growing Adoption

Elixir may be a relatively young language, but it has seen significant growth and adoption in recent years. According to the 2021 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Elixir was the 5th most loved programming language, with 72% of developers who have used it expressing interest in continuing to develop with it.

What‘s more, Elixir has seen increasing use in production at major companies. Bleacher Report, Discord, and PagerDuty all use Elixir and Phoenix to power their real-time applications and messaging systems. The performance and scalability offered by the Erlang VM make it an excellent choice for these high-traffic, high-concurrency workloads.

The 2021 ElixirConf US Keynote highlights many more companies and projects using Elixir, from startups to Fortune 500s. As the language continues to mature and gain mindshare, I expect to see even more growth and adoption in the coming years.

Challenges and Trade-offs

Of course, no language is perfect, and Elixir does have its trade-offs and challenges.

One potential drawback is the smaller ecosystem compared to more established languages. While the Elixir package manager, Hex, has a growing number of libraries, you may not find the same breadth of options as in the NPM ecosystem, for example. However, the core Elixir and Erlang libraries are quite comprehensive, and the community is very active in building and maintaining new packages.

Another challenge can be the learning curve, especially if you‘re coming from an object-oriented background. Functional programming requires a different way of thinking about problems and structuring code. Concepts like immutability, pattern matching, and recursion may feel foreign at first. However, I‘ve found that once it "clicks", functional code often ends up being more concise, predictable, and maintainable.

It‘s also worth noting that Elixir is not ideal for every use case. Its strengths lie in building scalable, real-time, fault-tolerant systems. For CPU-bound workloads or number crunching, you may be better off with a language like C or Rust. And for simple scripts or glue code, the overhead of the Erlang VM may not be worth it. As with any technology choice, it‘s important to consider your specific needs and constraints.

Learning Elixir

If you‘re interested in adding Elixir to your toolbelt, there are a wealth of resources available to help you get started. Here are a few of my favorites:

• The official Elixir Getting Started guide – A comprehensive, hands-on introduction to the language straight from the source.

• Elixir in Action – An excellent book that goes deep on Elixir and OTP, teaching you how to think in Elixir and build production-ready applications.

• Exercism‘s Elixir track – A collection of programming exercises and mentorship to help you practice your Elixir skills.

• The Pragmatic Studio‘s Elixir courses – Top-notch video courses that walk you through building real-world Elixir and Phoenix applications from scratch.

One of the things I love about the Elixir community is how welcoming and helpful it is. The Elixir Forum, Slack group, and subreddit are great places to ask questions, get feedback on your code, and learn from more experienced Elixir developers.

Conclusion

Learning Elixir has been a transformative experience for me as a developer. It‘s made me think more critically about the way I structure and reason about my code. It‘s given me new tools and techniques for building scalable, resilient systems. And it‘s introduced me to a vibrant, supportive community of developers who are pushing the language forward.

But beyond Elixir specifically, the process of learning a new language has made me a more well-rounded, adaptable programmer. It‘s easy to get stuck in the mindset of "this is the way I‘ve always done it". By stepping outside my comfort zone and grappling with new paradigms, I‘ve become a better problem solver.

So my advice to any developer, regardless of your background or current skill set, is to make continuous learning a priority. Pick a language that interests you, whether it‘s Elixir, Rust, Haskell, or something else entirely, and dive in. Read books and articles, build projects, contribute to open source. The insights and skills you gain will serve you well no matter what language you‘re working in.

Happy coding!