Just wanted to create a quick post about my dive into functional programming!

I started playing around with the Elixir programming language a week or so back and have been enjoying it so far. I’ve been wanting to learn a functional language for some time and have been trying to apply some functional techniques to my every day work in Angular and C#. I didn’t immediately start with Elixir though. I looked into some languages like Haskell, F#, Elm, and Clojure before settling on Elixir. Although Haskell is described as the purely functional language, I wanted to pursue something that I personally could dive into more quickly. Something that I’d be familiar with already because of my background involving web development.

I looked more closely into Elm and Elixir with the Phoenix framework and ultimately chose Elixir as the language to pursue. I like how José Valim, creator of Elixir, was a Ruby developer and Ruby on Rails was also something I’m wanting to explore down the road. I follow the creator of the Phoenix framework, Chris McCord, on twitter and I am especially interested in learning about Phoenix’s Live View. I’m trying to figure out a project I could do to explore this further and to incorporate Azure into the mix down the road.

So far my learning has involved the Pluralsight course Getting Started with Elixir with Nate Taylor. I setup my environment to use Jetbrains WebStorm and installed the Elixir plugin in order to get some Intellisense. It’s been a pretty good environment so far and Elixir itself was pretty easy to install on Solus using just sudo eopkg install elixir. Moving forward I think I’ll jump into the Elixir track on exercism for a bit before trying to tackle learning the Phoenix framework.