Joy of Elixir

Hi. Nice to meet you. Clearly you know who I am, but I am not sure who you are. Care to inform me? Maybe we've met before. Commenting anonymously in a venemous way like this is surely below someone like you. Come out of the shadows and come and play with me. This'll be fun!

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The book is released for free, however I charge for the PDF because it takes time + energy to generate that (and typesetting, omg) _and_ it gives people a way to financially support the project (if they want to).

Joy of Elixir will _always_ be free because I think having the bar of entry as low as possible for newbie programmers is a nice thing to do. As I say on Joy of Elixir's about page, I want this book to be the equivalent to Learn to Program, but for Elixir. So in that same vein, it will always be free.

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Regarding my Elixir experience: I have been happily using it for two years "for fun" and one year in production _almost_ full-time. I have built several parts of my workplace's microservice's architecture using Elixir in a small team of Elixir developers. I've learned a crap load and made some frankly _awesome_ mistakes.

In the last four months I've started mentoring a junior developer in the ways of Elixir and that's what led me down this path of writing a book directed at newbie developers.

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Brown-nosing on IRC? Hardly. I've been active on Freenode #rubyonrails for at least 10 years and #elixir-lang on-and-off for at least the past 2.

> IMHO someone which actually contributes high quality libraries or code to said community should be valued more, yet these are usually the last people you would ever see slapping their name on a book. They are happy to just improve the existing documentation and contribute that way.

I wrote https://github.com/radar/elastic. Sorry if this is not up to your high-quality bar. Patches welcome. Open source is great, yeah?

And by the way: I am strongly (so strongly) in the camp of documentation being more important than the code itself. For without documentation, who can understand how to use the code? Who can understand the _reasons_ behind the code?

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> This is all just A self promotional stunts. The author has done this before in the Rails community.

I started contributing documentation fixes / entire guides to the Rails community in 2008. I started using Rails in 2004. I felt it was one of the best ways that I could possibly give back to the community that has kept me very, very safely employed since 2006. 543 commits to Rails, at least: http://contributors.rubyonrails.org/contributors/ryan-bigg/c.... All for free.

In terms of self-promotional work, I spent at least two years of my free time writing books. Probably closer to three, but let's not brag too much. And yes, I _do_ use the books I wrote for self-promotion. It would be pretty ridiculous to spend all that time writing a book, selling it and then _not_ using them for self-promotion, dontyathink? I use them as more of an example of what I am capable of teaching people, more than "hey, look at how STUPENDOUSLY AMAZING I AM". Although, I admit, sometimes I act that way too.

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Anyway, it's been nice rebuffing your attacks today. I'm very happy to continue to play this game for as long as you wish. I guarantee you I have more patience.

And I implore you again: come out from the shadows, little troll.

Hi! Thanks for the kind comment :)

I find it an interesting idea too. I mentor people at Culture Amp in Ruby and Elixir and I'm definitely finding Elixir easier to teach for a couple of main reasons:

* It's Just Functions And Data™

* Inheritance isn't a thing

* Functions either come from within the same module if they don't have a module prefix

* Functions from other modules _must_ have a module prefix.

* Immutability, immutability, immutability.

It just _feels_ like there's less to learn with Elixir (foundational wise) than Ruby. It's been pretty nice.

These are hardly personal attacks on you, only expressions of opinion. Strange how everyone personally attacks me with far worse language than I have used?

I've been seeing a lot about Elixir lately. I am curious are people seeing a demand for Elixir in the market?

Or has anyone recently hired for it? If so what did it look like from the hiring side?

When I went to university for CS, Haskell was used in the introductory programming courses and this was one of the main reasons we were told about.

Another goal was to take the people who had been learning to code in their spare time and put them on more even footing with those who were totally new, force them to think about things from first principles rather than lean on acquired habits, etc.

I had already been coding for a long time by that point but it was the first time I saw a functional language and I think it addressed both goals very well.