My Journey: Learning Elixir from PHP/Laravel.

The Comfort Zone: PHP and JavaScript Ecosystem

As a web developer deeply rooted in the PHP/Laravel and JavaScript/Vue.js ecosystem, I had built robust web applications and felt comfortable with my tech stack. Laravel's elegant syntax and with all built in and Vue.js's reactive components made development smooth and enjoyable.

But Why to learn Elixir?

Several factors drew me to Elixir:

  • Concurrency Model: Elixir's actor model and lightweight processes (actors) offer superior concurrency compared to traditional synchronous languages.
  • Fault Tolerance: Built on the Erlang VM, Elixir provides exceptional system reliability through supervision trees.
  • Functional Paradigm: A pure functional language that encourages immutability and clean code structure.

Transition Challenges

Language Paradigm Shift

  • Moving from object-oriented PHP to functional Elixir required significant mindset changes
  • Pattern matching and immutability became my new programming companions

Ecosystem Differences

  • Replacing Laravel's Eloquent with Ecto
  • Switching from Vue.js to Phoenix LiveView for real-time interactions
  • Learning mix (Elixir's build tool) instead of Composer and npm

Learning Strategies

  1. Start Small: Build simple projects to understand core concepts
  2. Community Engagement: Join Elixir forums and study open-source projects
  3. Hands-on Project: Build a real-world application (e.g. Personal Finance Management, Nine Man's Morris Game) to apply all learned concepts.

Code Comparison: A Simple Example

PHP/Laravel

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use App\Models\User;

class UserController extends Controller {
   public function index() {
       $users = User::all();
       return view('users', compact('users'));
   }
}

Elixir/Phoenix

defmodule MyApp.UserController do
    def index(conn, _params) do
      users = Repo.all(User)
      render(conn, "index.html", users: users)
    end
end

Unexpected Benefits

  • Improved problem-solving skills
  • Better understanding of concurrent programming
  • More declarative and predictable code

Conclusion

Transitioning to Elixir wasn't just a language change—it was a paradigm shift that expanded my programming perspective. I'm loving learning Elixir and am actively working to make it my primary language in professional environments.