Elixir is developing a wide audience thanks to its friendly syntax, pragmatic ecosystem, and supportive community. It's a great way to get OO and imperative teams interested in functional programming. Elixir (and Erlang) are known for their soft-realtime features, but many people are afraid of the core libraries such as GenServer due to how unfamiliar they are.
This workshop is designed to get absolute Elixir beginners familiar with Elixir, how to interact with the ecosystem, understand the actor model, and work with the core libraries such as GenServer. Participants will get up and running with Elixir basics, understand the actor model, and learn about support libraries in Elixir. We will build a fully distributed CLI chat app with little beyond the core libraries, and have the class interact using it. Time permitting, we may build a simple game to run over the network, as well.
Attendees will learn the following concepts:
- Tagged tuples
- Stateless programming
- Supervision trees
- The actor model
- Parametric polymorphism
- Message passing (the Elixir way)
Attendees will develop the following skills:
- Get started with a fresh Elixir project
- How to write a soft-realtime application
- Fault-tolerance
- Testing Elixir
- How to avoid common gotchas
- Modeling systems with processes and actors
Participants will need to have a wifi-capable computer with Elixir 1.6.0+ installed to fully participate
