Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks

Day 1: Laying a Great Foundation

Our speed tour will focus on the three biggest influences on Elixir: Ruby, Lisp, and Erlang. Day 1 will show you where Ruby’s influence begins and ends. I’ll walk you through the basic building blocks of the language, while taking an informal look at operators, simple types, and expressions. Then, we’ll look at functions and modules. Finally, we will work with collections of things and craft together some simple programs with recursion. That’s a lot to handle, but to get to know this rich language, we’ll have to move fast.

Day 2 will bring forth the strong Lisp influences on the abstract syntax tree (AST), the foundation for Elixir’s macro system. We’ll focus most of our attention on building a macro to represent ...