Very interesting programming session with Jose Valim, creator and main commiter of the Elixir language. The format of the tutorial is very entertaining and original: instead of doing a structured introduction to the language, they pick an arbitrary programming task (parsing of HTTP streaming metadata files) and use it as leitmotiv to cover the main aspects of the language.

I enjoyed the session a lot because it’s also a good example of how to tackle a programming task with a TDD top-down approach. However, as a first introduction to the language it’s a bit rough. It’s worth noting that the course is a bit old (three and a half years as of this writing) so that the current state of the language might have evolved significantly.

This was my first contact with Elixir. While the syntax itself is naturally mostly inspired from Ruby and Erlang, some concepts like macros, pipeline operators and messaging were familiar to me thanks to Clojure.

In summary, I really enjoyed this tutorial and also because of the concise length it’s very worth watching.