patrickdm
Hello, I will start soon to teach programming basics to a friend who’s is totally new to the subject. I’d really like to use Elixir as her first ever programming language. Would you make the same choice? Or do you think I’d better go with something more mainstream and object oriented like python, ruby, or even javascript (and staying away from all its quicks). I feel FP far more intuitive and natural (but that’s the way my brain works) so Elixir would be my obvious first choice. what do you think about it? Are there any drawbacks I’m not considering? Thank you for your valuable opinions.
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alice
I am also a beginner at programming with some basic experience in JS and was going to ask whether learning Elixir as a first language is a good idea. IMO FP is also more intuitive and from what I read might be easier to learn if you have no prior experience in OO.
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alice
The only thing I noticed was that the author of the online course kept saying that functional programming is not intuitive and I was like what are you talking about OO is not intuitive this is totally intuitive - input and output, what’s more intuitive than that. lol.
mindriot
It maybe could be a good choice in some cases, I’m not really in a position to judge that. One thing I do think is important though is to think about the outcome. She would like to learn a programming language presumably for a reason, how does elixir specifically fit into that context. For example if she would like to make a mobile game then it probably isn’t a very good choice and she will likely have to learn an OOP language after to get there so the value in learning elixir is first fairly low with a high cost of time commitment. Similarly if she is thinking of a career change but there are no elixir jobs in the area she lives then it likely won’t further her goal that much in comparison to investing the time in something that has those career prospects.
dimitarvp
I remember a linked article on HN 1-2 years ago, written by several CS professors, that students who start off with functional programming can then very easily learn imperative / OOP programming but the reverse has been proven to be not true: if you start with imperative and OOP then it’s really hard to rewire your brain to work with FP. It does happen but it takes more time and effort.
So yep, Elixir as a first language would work better.
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LeoUgiete
I think it’s excellent, at University I started with Haskell, another functional language and this kinda avoid some OO bias and helped me when I was introduced to C, Python and so on