How to Start with Elixir? Introduction, Installation, and Practice

Codescrum has been using this programming language on a couple of projects, but it is still a strange language in the market and still a little unknown, so in this post, we are going to explore Elixir from the beginning and tell you how we work with it.

What is Elixir?

We cannot talk about Elixir without mentioning Erlang, so we will start this post in the eighties when the development of telecommunication services grew, and the companies needed to offer communication services without any interruption, concurrency, or fault tolerance. Ericsson created an Open Telecom Platform (OTP) called Erlang, and then made it Open Source in the nineties, and we used its advantages to develop other languages and tools.

Elixir is built on top of Erlang’s VM, called BEAM, which compiles to Erlang’s bytecode. Elixir’s syntax looks like Ruby, so if you have already programmed in Ruby, the syntax will feel familiar. Elixir can use dynamic typing by default, or static typing, using typespecs’ built-in functionality when building critical systems.

In the Elixir ecosystem, we found Phoenix, an MVC web framework. Despite Elixir and Phoenix not being as mature as other languages, like Ruby or Python, or frameworks like Ruby on Rails or Django (which has just had ten…