Elixir Ruby

Elixir is often compared to Ruby. It’s true that Elixir takes inspiration from Ruby’s syntax. One of Elixir’s core tenets is “metaprogramming”, something often associated with Ruby and its ecosystem. That said, after using Elixir for a small amount of time it is immediately obvious that the semantics of the languages are very different. More subtly, Elixir focuses on explicitness where Ruby is often implicit. In this blog post, I’ll discuss Elixir’s approach to composing functionality in an explicit manner. ...

Recently, I’ve been spending some time working in Erlang and Elixir. I had tried to break into Erlang in the past but I was always stymied by the steep learning curve of OTP. gen_server in particular always seemed like black magic to me. However, after attending an Erlang workshop at Lambda Jam this year it finally clicked for me. After I finally “got it” I had another realization: it isn’t that complicated, but there aren’t very many good explanations. In this post I’m going to attempt to explain gen_server using Elixir and Ruby code and some simple diagrams. ...