Elixir “Hello World”

visit the github repo

Introduction

After a discussion with Arjan Kleene, we decided that it would be fun to see what the Elixir programming languages is like.

First steps in Elixir

• Installed an Elixir plugin for my IDE.
• Looked up Elixir on Wikipedia to get some background (like the fact that the language started in 2012).
• Installed Elixir, brew install elixir for OSX or sudo apt-get install elixir on Debian/Ubuntu. Of course, as Elixir is build on top of the Erlang VM, one of the dependencies was Erlang which took some time to download and install, being 7460 files and 286MB.
• elixir -v -> Elixir 1.0.5
• Wrote a ‘hello world’.
• Looked up IO.puts in the manual.
• Read about Basic types in the Elixir manual.
• Tried making a more complex “hello world”.
• Learned an interesting lesson about variables, atoms and string interpolation.

That (and reading through the manual for a bit) was a fun introduction into the language. Easy to install, easy to understand and fun to use, I can understand why some people are betting on Elixir.