Take Off with Elixir

Welcome to Red:4 - Where the Future Starts Yesterday. Blah blah blah we hope you like it here blah blah… We don't have a lot of time so let's just get to it shall we?

Elixir syntax can be familiar and weird at the same time, especially if you're coming from Ruby. To prepare for this section, let's clear our minds - let go of familiar syntax cues and 'the way it's done' in the languages you already know.

Functional programming has been around forever; it's nothing new. Elixir is a functional language, as is its progenitor, Erlang. If you're coming from an Object-oriented language like Java, Ruby, C#, Python or JavaScript, functional programming will take some getting used to.

You can think of Mix as your Elixir Utility Belt. It builds your projects, runs tasks for you, runs your tests, installs packages - a fascinating tool. That comes later - right now open up your terminal and navigate to a directory where you can save your work.

I hope you're prepared to learn on the job. I'm about to ramp things up on you and it's for the simple reason that I'm under the gun - and to be honest *so are you*. We just got a new CTO, she arrived a few weeks after I got the job. She doesn't like me... which I guess isn't all that surprising.

Pattern Matching in Elixir is one of those things that can be vexxing, interesting, or obvious. Ultimately, however, it will be confusing if you have never dealt with it before.

In this part we tidy things up, plugging in Authentication and hooking our download service into Firebase Storage.Nice work so far! The Science Team loves what we're doing and, as you might expect, have given us more work.

I'm always amazed when I manage to write Elixir code that compiles correctly the first time. It almost never happens! Let's have a look at a normal sequence you might stumble through, and I'll see if I can save you some time.

We need to get rolling which means we need to setup a project and start cranking out some code! In this video we'll structure our project with tests and get to know the difference between Elixir script files and compilable executables.

Functional programming is all about transforming data and if we're going to work with Solar Flares, we need to understand how Lists work - how we query, slice, dice, add and remove. That's what we're going to do now.

Most developers know about recursion and have used it once or twice in their careers; perhaps more. It can be quite difficult to get right - this is not the case with Elixir. With a combination of pattern matching and the head/tail functionality of Lists, recursively iterating over lists is straightforward.

Here's something weird to think about: in a high-level functional language such as Elixir, writing conditional code is not exactly idiomatic. Using a combination of pattern matching and syntax rules we can write extremely clean code free of if statements and conditionals in general

You've seen a lot of Elixir so far and have learned some new concepts, especially if you're new to functional programming. No doubt that along the way you've probably been wondering, however: *how is this all supposed to work together? how can I actually build something?*. I've showed you a few little hints, but it's time to get explicit on this

You have to store data somewhere and Elixir (and Erlang in general) give you quite a few tools to do so. In this video we'll see how to push data into PostgreSQL using Ecto, the ORM created by the Elixir team.

We're in the weeds now! Sorry for the pain, but hey, backing over a cliff is what we do as developers isn't it? You *will find yourself completely stuck* when working with Elixir and I need you to be able to reason your way out of this mess.

Developers often confuse *asynchronous* execution with *concurrent* or parallel execution. I do this often! It's something I learn and unlearn, all the time. Let's take a small tangent and discuss the difference.