Hello,

In the last several months I tried to learn Elixir and Phoenix. Thanks to some good learning material I think I have learned the basics.

I have some experience with some other programming languages, mainly Java and R. Both have an exceptional IDE (intelliJ and RStudio) which support me a lot in my daily routines (commands on cli, debugging, etc.).

While I feel it is not so hard to think in functional programming (coming from an OOP background), it is very hard for me to program “blindly” in Elixir. In RStudio I can always see and inspect all the variables in memory so I can step through my code line by line and see how it changes my variables. My approach to programming is trial and error: I write a new line of code, try it (in most cases by using breakpoints and then inspect my variables, but in RStudio you also can execute just a selected line) and when it does what I wanted it to do I move to the next line…

I miss this extremely when I am developing with Elixir so I guess I’m doing it wrong. What is the right approach with Elixir? Writing testing functions? Are there any guides/tutorials for this?

The books I know show and explain what is the correct code, but not how to come to it. Hopefully you can understand what I mean. It is not so easy to explain…