Adopting Elixir (Pragprog)

[AstonJ]

@redrapids

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but folks don’t always like to pay for books in other language ecosystems, and quality suffers. What I am saying in a way too verbose way is that you, the community, make all of this work, and I genuinely thank you.

This is one of the things I’ve commented on in some of my posts about Ruby

Culture

I want to cover culture on its own, because not all of it comes from the community. Of course the Ruby community will push you towards test driven development, writing good clean idiomatic code, contributing back to Ruby or other open source projects and generally helping you become a good Ruby citizen. But some cultural aspects are inherently down to the language itself – bizarre as that might sound.

The most important, and perhaps what will (and should?) make for interesting reading for managers and the ‘enterprise’, is the culture of learning.

If you go back to my list at the start of this post, you’ll see the brief list of things that make for Ruby Programmer Happiness™ – and what do people excel at? Things they enjoy

I noticed a massive difference in my desire to learn Ruby, compared to PHP. PHP totally uninspired me. Don’t get me wrong, I was as desperate to learn to program as much as I’ve ever been (maybe even moreso back then) but all I wanted to do was get through the PHP books as quickly as possible just to ‘get on with it’. I never really enjoyed PHP, therefore I didn’t enjoy learning it – and that’s a problem, because people will generally only do the minimum or just skim over stuff, never truly understanding things.

Ruby, by contrast, is something I love. I enjoy reading about it and learning as much as I can. My appetite for all things Ruby is insatiable – and I’m not exactly a geek! It is just constantly, pleasantly, surprising me, and things just seem to ‘stick’ more (that’s testament to Matz wanting to make it a ‘natural’ language) so morale is always high. Additionally, because Ruby is very natural and therefore easy to pick up, you get people from all walks of life giving it a go – and that’s brilliant because it brings in creative people that might have otherwise not got into programming at all.

This, I think, is why you get better Ruby programmers. Of a higher skill-set and with more ‘experience’ – we tend to enjoy furthering our knowledge because we enjoy the topic so much. I really can’t stress this point enough, this is the reason (which itself is only there because of all the other factors) why I believe Ruby is going to grow at a phenomenal rate – it’s because we want to, not because we have to (JS/browsers) or we’re told we should do (Java/enterprise).

I think the exact same thing applies to Elixir

@redrapids

On the Elixir ecosystem and books you like and would like to see, are there any books that you need that we don’t provide?

You might find this thread interesting:

Your ideas for Elixir book authors and content creators

Inspired by @jeramyRR’s post, if you had the ear of a book author or publisher, or someone who might be thinking about creating other educational content, what would you tell them? Several authors and content creators that you know of (and one or two you might not!) frequent the forum - this could be your chance to get your requests in

@redrapids

Let’s see some proposals!

I love the idea of more books from more authors. One of the things I really enjoy about reading books is that everyone has a different style and approach, and sometimes some authors just hit that sweet spot for you.

Personally I would absolutely LOVE for Pragprog to do a book with @russolsen …one of my favourite tech authors of all time