Liftoff
Elixir is in a fairly unique position as a programming language, in that it combines contemporary language features and excellent developer ergonomics with the established and battle-tested Erlang ecosystem.
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LiftoffOrigins, Foundations & Core Principles
When setting off to learn a new programming language, it's often incredibly useful to understand the language's foundations. In this case, we're dealing with a language built on top of another language, which runs on a virtual machine that supports other languages
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LiftoffInteractive Elixir
Elixir's interactive shell (IEx) is one of the most powerful tools in your toolbox. We'll outline some of the most useful features for beginners, including:
- Running scripts
- Getting metadata about a value
- Accessing embedded documentation
- Inspecting the state of a particular process
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LiftoffIO & Files
As with most programming languages, it's useful to know how to interact with files and humans. We'll take care of this early on, and notice a few things that foreshadow some interesting aspects of Elixir's concurrency model.
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LiftoffEXERCISE: Reading a CSV File
We're going to have to take a few things for granted, since we're just starting out, but let's use some existing well-documented code to read a CSV file into memory, and print some information about it to the console.