Presentation given at Rotterdam.rb ruby meetup group on the Elixir programming language. I discuss its history and benefits.

1. Elixir for Rubyists
A short introduction
PRESENTATION
By Maarten van Vliet

2. Maarten van Vliet
Backend developer @ Awkward
github: maartenvanvliet
website: maartenvanvliet.nl
About me

3. We build digital
products
About Awkward

4. We are hiring!
• Come talk to me afterwards

5. Elixir for Rubyists
• About Ruby and why I like it
• What is Elixir
• A short history of Elixir
• Elixir and Ruby

6. First:
I Ruby

7. Why I love Ruby?
Community
Developer Experience
Ecosystem

8. Community
Welcoming
Friendly
Fun

9. Developer experience
Tooling
Syntax
Expressiveness
$rails generate model User name:string
$rails db:migrate
class User < ApplicationRecord
validates :name, presence: true
has_many :events
end
user = User.new
user.save

10. Ecosystem
There’s a gem for everything
High quality
Productive

11. This is why
I Ruby

12. If Ruby is so
awesome…
Why Elixir?

13. • Dynamic functional programming
language
• Erlang VM
• Scalable
• Distributed
• Fault tolerant
What is Elixir?

14. Elixir has its roots in the Ruby/Rails
community
It was founded by Jose Valim in 2011
Former Rails Core team member
Author of Devise the Rails
authentication gem
Making Rails threadsafe
History of Elixir

15. Jose had the need for a better
concurrency story
Explored multiple technologies (e.g.
Clojure, Erlang)
Then he built Elixir on the Erlang
Virtual Machine
Leverage multiple cores
• Cheap processes
• Isolated from each other
• Can run concurrently
Why Elixir?

16. Similar aims as Ruby
More explicit
DSL’s
Metaprogramming at compile time
Language features
$mix phx.gen.schema User users name:string
$mix ecto.migrate
defmodule User do
use Ecto.Schema
schema “users” do
field :name, :string
has_many :events, Blog.Event
end
def changeset(user, params %{}) do
user
|> cast(params, [:name])
|> validate_required([:name])
end
end
user = User.changeset(%User{})
Repo.insert(user)
Ruby roots

17. Similar to chaining in Ruby
When you pipe into a function, its
first argument is placed before the
|> character.
So, the list is passed to the
Enum.map function then it is
squared, filtered and summed
Was proposed for Ruby but would
work the same as the “.” chaining
operator
Piping operator# Elixir
[1, 2, 3, 4]
|> Enum.map(fn x -> x*x end)
|> Enum.filter(fn x -> x > 1 end)
|> Enum.sum
29
# Ruby
[1,2,3,4].
map{|x| x*x }.
select{|x| x > 1}.
sum
29

18. Also introduced as experiment in
Ruby 2.7
Cross pollination
Works on function heads
Pattern matching#elixir
user = %User{
name: “Alice”
}
def get_name(%{name: name}) do
name
end
def get_name(_) do
nil
end
get_name(user)
“Alice”
get_name(1)
nil

19. The ecosystem provides unique
features
Immutability
Erlang VM
Fast/scalable
Realtime features
Phoenix Liveview
Why use it then?

20. Ruby and Elixir
Community
Developer Experience
Ecosystem
Shared values

21. Community
• Like Ruby, welcoming and friendly
community
• elixirforum.com
• elixir-lang.slack.com
Shared values

22. Developer experience
• Focussed on developer happiness/
tooling
• Productive and expressive code
• Well documented
• Built-in test framework
• Fast and concurrent
Shared values

23. Ecosystem
• hex.pm package manager
• Hexdocs - each package can publish
its documentation
• High quality libraries e.g.
• Phoenix - web framework
• Ecto - Data access layer
• Absinthe - graphql framework
Shared values

24. Takeaways
Shares many of the values that Ruby has
Many familiar concepts
Try it out sometime!
It's awesome

25. March 12
Elixir Meetup in Rotterdam
Awkward & Equalture will host
an Elixir meetup at Startdock
Westplein 12-14
6 - 9 pm
Sign up now at meetup.com

26. March 25
Elixir Workshop
Rotterdam.rb
At Beequp
6 - 9 pm
Sign up now at meetup.com

27. Any questions?