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Introduction

Welcome to a journey through the most simple elements of the Elixir programming language. Elixir was designed for building critical production systems. It is a functional language and implements the actor model. But what does that mean?

• Functional: This is a programming paradigm (a way of approaching programming tasks). The industry (and especially the Danish industry) is dominated by object-oriented languages. That is a different paradigm. But that doesn’t mean that functional programming doesn’t have its place.
• Actor model: This is probably the easiest to use concurrency model, and that is key when one has to deal with many operations that happen concurrently. That is, instead of having a single flow through the program, there can be a large number of more or less independent flows.

Note: This workshop does not try to be completely technically correct all the time. Being so would require it to be much larger and significantly less approachable to newcomers.

We will be working with Elixir through Livebook. This is a code editor that you essentially access through a browser. There are many ways of writing Elxir code (that doesn’t involve a browser), but Livebook brings some attractive possibilities for getting an overview of the code and visualizing data.

First, you will have to install) Livebook, and then you should configure it:

1. Open the main page in a new tab in your browser. This can be done using the Livebook logo at the top left of the page.
2. Click in this tab on Settings in the menu to the left.
3. Under Code editor you enable Render ligatures and disable Automatically close brackets.

Next, you will need to choose between two difficulties:

1. Beginner: If you have never programmed before you start here.
2. Advanced: If you feel like you have a good feel for at least one programming language then you start here.

This choice will send you through the following material:

%%{init: {"flowchart": {"htmlLabels": false}} }%%
graph TD;
  Module1["`**Module 1:**
Values, tuples and pattern matching`"];
  Module2["`**Module 2:**
Booleans, if, string and case`"];
  Module3["`**Module 3:**
Functions`"];
  Module4["`**Module 4:**
Lists, higher order functions, pipelining and modules`"];
  Module5["`**Module 5:**
Maps`"];
  Module6["`**Module 6:**
Colors`"];
  Module7["`**Module 7:**
Structs`"];
  
  Module8["`**Module 8:**
Circles`"];
  Module9["`**Module 9:**
Fibonacci Sequence`"];
  Module10["`**Module 10:**
Concurrency`"];
  
  Start-->Module1-->Module2-->Module3-->Module4-->Module5-->Module6-->Module7-->Module8;
  Start-->Module8-->Module9-->Module10;

If this is interesting to you, then you could spend a bit of time watching some live coding with José Valim (the creator of Elixir) here.