Elixir 4-Hour Morning Tutorial

Elixir 4-Hour Tutorial

Trainer: Robert Virding

Target Audience: Developers

Prerequisites: Basic Linux or OSX, another scripting or programming language

Description:  Elixir is a functional, meta-programming aware language built on top of the Erlang VM. It is a dynamic language with flexible syntax and macro support that leverages Erlang's abilities to build concurrent, distributed and fault-tolerant applications with hot code upgrades and it also provides first-class support for pattern matching, polymorphism via protocols (similar to Clojure's), aliases and associative data structures (usually known as dicts or hashes in other programming languages). Finally, Elixir and Erlang share the same bytecode and data types. This means you can invoke Erlang code from Elixir (and vice-versa) without any conversion or performance hit. This allows a developer to mix the expressiveness of Elixir with the robustness and performance of Erlang.

This tutorial will present an introduction to Elixir for experienced programmers and show its strengths and how it can be used to build concurrent and fault-tolerant applications.

About Robert

Robert Virding is Principal Language Expert at Erlang Solutions Ltd. While at Ericsson AB, Robert was one of the original members of the Ericsson Computer Science Lab, and co-inventor of the Erlang language. He took part in the original system design and contributed much of the original libraries, as well as to the current compiler.

While at the lab he also did a lot of work on the implementation of logic and functional languages and on garbage collection. He has also worked as an entrepreneur and was one of the co-founders of one of the first Erlang startups (Bluetail). Robert also worked a number of years at the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV) Modelling and Simulations Group. He co-authored the first book (Prentice-Hall) on Erlang, and is regularly invited to teach and present throughout the world.

GitHub: rvirding

Twitter: @rvirding

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