What is Elixir and why are you interested in learning it?

In general, I find Elixir interesting for three reasons:

• I find the Actor Model of computation very compelling, and Erlang's where it has had the most time to develop.
• Since it's built upon the Erlang VM, you can use it to write extremely reliable, distributed, concurrent systems.
• I find the syntax pleasant, and the tooling outstanding.

Erlang

Install Erlang

I personally like to be able to easily run different versions of my programming languages, and for this I use the asdf version manager.

You can install asdf by cloning it into ~/.asdf:

# Feel free to check for a new version, but v0.2.1 is the latest as of this
# writing.
git clone https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf.git ~/.asdf

Then, you can read README.md of the .asdf , and continue to instal Erlang and Elixir.

Verifying your Erlang installation

> $ erl
Erlang/OTP 21 [erts-10.0.4] [source] [64-bit] [smp:4:4] [ds:4:4:10] [async-threads:1] [hipe]

Eshell V10.0.4  (abort with ^G)
1> 

Elixir

Install Elixir

Also , we install Elixir with .asdf.

Firing up iex

> $ iex
Erlang/OTP 21 [erts-10.0.4] [source] [64-bit] [smp:4:4] [ds:4:4:10] [async-threads:1] [hipe]

Interactive Elixir (1.7.1) - press Ctrl+C to exit (type h() ENTER for help)
iex(1)> 

Just press Ctrl+C twice to close the shell out. You can also exit the shell by pressing Ctrl+\ if you want a single keystroke :)

Summary

Today, we walked through installing Erlang and Elixir. I've added some links in the resources section to encourage you to get involved in the community. See you soon!

Resources

• The Erlang website
• The Erlang Solutions download page
• The Elixir website
• The Elixir downloads page
• The asdf version manager
• asdf-erlang
• asdf-elixir
• IEx documentation
• Quitting IEx

Where can you get more help with Elixir?

• The #elixir-lang IRC channel on FreeNode
• The elixir-lang Slack is extremely active.
• The Elixir Forum
• The Elixir Website is very well done and has lots of nice information.
• The DailyDrip Elixir Topic
• I'm always in the DailyDrip Slack, as are other DailyDrip subscribers that are glad to be helpful.
• Elixir School