Introduction to Elixir - A Background and the Primitive Types - Part One

[@daveybalmer]

What makes this video so good is the tonal quality of the narrator and its pace. Easy listening is great for absorption as opposed to many other videos wherein the presenter is in a great hurry with everything where as a result things can get murky. That is not the case here. Thanks Tensor - I look forward to discovering your further contributions to enlightenment!!

[@TensorProgramming]

Thats surprising, since I do tend to "rush" a bit in these videos. At least that is how they've been edited.

[@tjpld]

Functional progrmming just feels right. Paired with Elixirs clean syntax it is an absolute joy. Lots of cool tech is evolving around Elixir like Horde a distributed Supervisor and Registry.

[@TensorProgramming]

Yeah, Hordes is pretty cool. So is phoenix LiveView and Whistle but even among all of that we've got the full OTP and the BEAM which are amazing pieces of technology. Ill be covering as much as I can in this series in so far as OTP and Elixir goes. And of course, this includes Elixir's brand of Functional programming which uses pipes rather then function composition.

[@daivasmara2749]

finally found this! there's not many elixir resources and most of them i'm not really able to learn from somehow, but this was the best! thanks alot!

[@TensorProgramming]

Glad you found it useful. It is a shame but yes, you are right, there aren't many good elixir resources out there.

[@sumanth3036]

I am learning Elixir for the past few days. This is the best, comphrehensive intro. Thanks

[@striker865]

Nice! Elixir is tight, I'd love to work with it, I hear amazing things from super smart developers I respect a lot

[@TensorProgramming]

I use quite a few languages on the regular and I have a nice little soft spot for elixir. Its a joy to work with and damned powerful for the use-cases that it specializes in.

[@seanknowles5309]

@@TensorProgramming Could you do a comparison video between Elixir and Go, your opinions on what you prefer and why?

[@TensorProgramming]

@@seanknowles5309 That would be a pretty strange comparison. The two languages almost exist in two separate domains.

[@seanknowles5309]

@@TensorProgramming oh I've seen quite few of comparison videos based between them both. Seems to me that for scalable microservice architecture, concurrent connections and parallel processes they do battle it out for stack market share. I am a new dev so eitherway thought it might be interesting to here a comparison video on which to choose over one another and for what reasons.

[@aleksandrkravtsov8727]

Thank you for this great course!

[@TensorProgramming]

Glad you found them useful.

[@amermohammed8568]

Best elixir intro course.

[@vbroskas]

This was a very well done and informative video, I'm looking forward to the rest of the series. As someone who is a junior web developer using Python/Django, would learning elixer be beneficial? Is it feasible that if I put in the time with it there are career prospects for me? Please keep in mind I've only been working in development 2.5 years. Thanks!

[@TensorProgramming]

There is nothing wrong with learning something new even if you don't plan on using it in your job. You can always try to convince management to use Phoenix if you think that it fits the use-case a bit better than Django. And even if that never happens, learning Elixir will teach you to be a better developer overall.

[@vbroskas]

@@TensorProgramming Welp, turns out it was both feasible and there are career prospects. Currently working at my second Elixir gig! Thanks!

[@TensorProgramming]

@@vbroskas Congratulations. I too am also using Elixir on the project that I've been working on for the past year or so. My original comment wasn't to say that its not a viable option for work, its just rare compared to many other languages but the shops that do use elixir really need elixir devs because they are also somewhat rare. Have fun, hope you do well on this Gig.

[@vbroskas]

@@TensorProgramming No worries, your original comment was great. I actually forgot all about the comment I made on this video until yesterday when I was sending my brother good resources for learning elixir. It was cool to see how much things have changed over the last year. Thanks for all the great tutorials you make!

[@TensorProgramming]

@@vbroskas Not a problem. Very cool to hear when a Sub ends up getting into the industry.

[@gamenetic6426]

Nice tutorial! Looking forward to watch the next ones

[@TensorProgramming]

There are a bunch of elixir tutorials on the way given that I am not using it as my main language in a project.

[@alrightsquinky7798]

Fantastic introduction! Slight error at 28:50 when you mention string sigils and interpolation. Using “~s()” you do get interpolation, but if you use “~S()”, with a capital S, you do not get interpolation.

[@TensorProgramming]

Sure, there is a distinction there. There are also a ton of sigils I didn't cover though.

[@andibensisva2155]

thank you Tensor

[@loveandroid62]

Nice course! The introduction about Erlang sounded like it came directly from Elixir in Action book haha.

[@TensorProgramming]

I suppose great minds think alike. That being said, the background of elixir and erlang is pretty straight forward: Ive had to explain it more than a few times over the years. Anyhow, glad you like the content. I am working to update this series, especially since I never really got to finish it properly.

[@olexiymelnychuk7274]

Thank you! Are you planning phoenix lessons in the future?

[@TensorProgramming]

Yes, absolutely. I will also be doing Phoenix Live Streams as well.

[@angius]

Hi, would it be possible to create a tutorial on how to set up a similar environment to what you have? I've been trying for a couple hours now, and without success. Most I managed to achieve is install Emacs and open it to some read-only text file.

[@TensorProgramming]

For Emacs I am using a setup called Spacemacs. Its pretty self explanatory and they've got a ton of documentation on setting things up. www.spacemacs.org/ They use what are called Layers which installs a set of plugins for whatever it is that you want to do. if you put in say Elixir, it will install a bunch of extensions that work with elixir; such as the ones you see in this video. I use Emacs a lot but VSCode works just as well for working with Elixir too and you will see that I use it more in the future videos. The main reason I used Emacs in this video is because I wanted a more intelligible Repl for Windows. On the Terminal you don't get auto completion or syntax highlighting.

[@danimusbar]

thankyou for the tuts, please make more tuts especially building web app or web development with PHOENIX Framework.

[@Akash-oo5bx]

I am in my first year of graduation, and thinking to opt for a future proof language to choose for a carrier, I have my background in cpp but thinking of also giving a shot to emerging language, what is your take on it, your recommendations for example between, zig,rust, elixir etc :)

[@TensorProgramming]

You can't really go wrong with any of those apart from maybe zig (at least as far as work goes). Zig just hasn't seen much adoption yet, so I wouldn't expect to find any stable position with it in the next 5 years or so (its not a bad language, its just very new). Elixir is starting to ramp up more in terms of adoption due to it use in ML and Rust is gaining traction as it has for the past 3-4 years. Even if you don't find a position with any of these languages out of the gate, doesn't mean that there isn't any value in learning them. When you climb far enough up the totem pole as a dev, you can pick whatever technology you want assuming you can make a good argument. Each of these languages will teach you a new paradigm and give you yet another tool in your programming toolbelt. Hell, I still write lisp, APL and prolog sometimes because they are very good tools for what they do.

[@chusto33]

just a quetion about emacs, do you have any video tutorial where I can follow the steps on how to configure elixir? thanks Tensor

[@TensorProgramming]

No, I did not make an Emacs tutorial. However, in this video and in general, I use the spacemacs emacs distribution which is very easy to setup. It has "layers" which allow you to enable a bunch of emacs packages for each given language. So if you enable the Elixir layer, it will setup basically everything you saw in this video. You can find the information here: www.spacemacs.org/ and you can find information on the different layers here: www.spacemacs.org/layers/LAYERS.html

[@CherryPoppinz]

Maybe a more beginner oriented question - any ideas for a "weekend project" that one could build with elixir? I don't really have a use case for the language, yet I am strangely drawn to it :D

[@TensorProgramming]

While Elixir does have a very niche usecase, you can use it for things outside of that usecase. You can build Neural networks and other machine learning projects, building GUI apps, write systems and make embedded projects. There are the obvious choices for a weekend project, building a full Twitter/KZbin/Facebook/Instagram clone etc or you could sit down and building a CLI or a Programming language. Its really up to you and what you are interested in doing.

[@Gimperion]

What emacs package are you using to load iex shell? Alchemist?

[@TensorProgramming]

yes alchemist. I am using the Spacemacs Elixir layer so its likely there are a few other packages in there too.

[@oddballgromov4649]

Thanks, Tensor Programming !👍

[@tronganhnguyenthanh1157]

This is weird on Elixir. Why does it have to appear the code x = 10 twice, but it doesn't print the number 10 directly when we type x = 10 for the first time ? x = 10 x = 10 10 But not x = 10 10.

[@TensorProgramming]

Its showing the input and the output. The first line is just what I typed where as the 2nd line is the input in the repl and the 3rd line is the output. If you did this in the CLI instead of emacs, it would just show one line for input and one for output.

[@tronganhnguyenthanh1157]

How does Elixir convert from 0xFF into 255 and 3.0e-2 into 0.03 ?

[@TensorProgramming]

It just has to do with the basic conversion that happens inside of the repl for the sake of simplicity. In reality, all of these values have equivalencies as far as data goes.

[@terryphelps4204]

Why do you call a tilde (~) an "enye"??

[@TensorProgramming]

I know its called a Tilde; I just don't often use that word and when I get a "cache miss" in my memory, I default to my first exposure to the character; aka the enye in spanish which is the N with the tilde above it. Its a part of my dyslexia (I am guessing) that I tend to make associations like this with different words and characters and end up using them over their proper names.

[@siddhisawant2560]

i am a beginner in elixir. could you help in creating a code for Function that takes single image as an argument and provides the matrix of detected numbers? it would be a big help. please.....

[@TensorProgramming]

You should look into the Nx library if you are interested in Machine learning and image classification. If you are just trying to get the bytes, there are a couple of good libraries like Image and Mogrify.

[@АлександрМафиози]

WOW!

[@MikeNugget]

Would be very interesting to watch some tutorial about Elixir scaling

[@TensorProgramming]

Elixir scales very naturally if you use the actor model properly.

[@MikeNugget]

@@TensorProgramming would be nice to see some some video about this

[@shauryaverma8780]

Please let us know how you install emacs

[@TensorProgramming]

Depends on the platform that you are on. If you are on windows you can get it from the gnu emacs site and just unzip the zip file and then run it. You can also use command line tools like scoop and chocolatey to get it. On Linux and Mac you use their respective package managers to get emacs. And then for spacemacs, its a matter of cloning the github repo into the emacs folder.

[@shauryaverma8780]

@@TensorProgramming Thank you :)

[@antonygunawan2607]

Hello, thank you for the video Can you do video on how to built websocket without phoenix in elixir? Thank you

[@TensorProgramming]

At somepoint perhaps; plug has websocket support and there are some websocket specific libraries out there.

[@evans8245]

ahhh yeh, the elixir of life, which alcohol free beer is yo favorite

[@TensorProgramming]

I don't drink non-alcoholic beverages.

[@adicide9070]

your name is not tensor.

[@TensorProgramming]

it is for the videos. Its a pseudonym.