Learn to Program with Elixir

I’ve been helping people become programmers at The Flatiron School for the last few years. I’ve taught hundreds of people how to program using Ruby. I love Ruby. It’s simple. Low ceremony and most importantly, it gets out of your way and lets you code.

I love teaching with Ruby because it introduces abstract thought without needing to know hieroglyphics. The skills you learn easily (code organization, programmatic thinking, debugging) transfers over to all other programming languages. My response to “What programming language should I learn?” from now on will be “Elixir”.

But there aren’t any joooooobs in Elixir. You’re RIGHT my fictional reader! If you’re interested in programming for the long haul, your first programming language should be to set you up for your career. I could suggest you go learn JavaScript (I won’t, I love you too much), but what if your first job is building backends with F#? You trudged through JavaScript’s idiosyncrasies for what?!

Instead, I’d suggest you learn a language that not only prepares you for the code of today, but the code of the FUTURE!

One thing is for sure. The world is changing. For years, developers could wait for the machines we ran our code on to get faster, and for a long time, it did, but The Free Ride Is Over. With this in mind, what if there was a language that was just as low ceremony as Ruby, taught you the fundamentals of programming with that same level of ease, AND laid the groundwork for you to to learn to build really powerful applications? I think there is, with Elixir.