Elixir is a functional, meta-programmable language that is built on top of the Erlang VM. Created by José Valim in 2011, it has recently gained a lot of interest, especially amongst Ruby and Erlang programmers. Joe Armstrong, one of the inventors of Erlang, even wrote nice things about Elixir.

For those who are not familiar with José, he is a core committer to the Ruby on Rails web framework, and author of popular Ruby gems like Devise. Therefore, it is not surprising to see some Ruby influence in the design of the language. As you would soon see, Elixir also borrows many ideas from various programming languages, such as Clojure, Haskell and Python.

In this article, we take a whirlwind tour of some of best features of Elixir. Along the way, we look at a few short snippets of Elixir code. Let’s dive straight in!

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