5 Reasons to Love Elixir

Love the Elixir language and stack, if you don’t already

Photo by Jan Huber on Unsplash

Whenever I have a new side project idea, the need to build a quick prototype, or even an opportunity to build something from scratch at work, I keep coming back to Elixir time and time again.

Elixir has a strong pull on me, and not without reason. The language creators have done an exceptional job of building not only a fantastic language but also a thriving ecosystem.

The following five are some of the reasons why I keep coming back to Elixir.

Mix

Mix is a build tool that ships with Elixir and provides tasks for creating, compiling, testing, debugging, managing dependencies, and much more.

Mix is comparable to tools like rake or artisan if you are coming from the Ruby and PHP worlds respectively.

Creating a new project

mix new myproject

Running that command will generate our new project with the boilerplate structure and necessary files. The output will look something like the following:

- creating README.md
- creating .formatter.exs
- creating .gitignore
- creating mix.exs
- creating lib
- creating lib/myproject.ex
- creating test