Programming Elixir teaches you the language - how you apply it is either down to you (based on your experience, perhaps specifically, in designing concurrent/parallel systems) or, based on what you learn next. Luckily, there’s a lot of material on the latter!

I have currently read/done:

And loved every single one of them (check out my reviews in their respective threads). Dave’s course shows you how to apply Elixir - and it is one of the best programming courses I have ever done!

There are other books and courses that show you how to ‘think’ in or get the most out of Elixir too, have a look through our Learning Resources > Books and Learning Resources > Courses sections

Insert semi made up quote about “Every sufficiently concurrent program includes a buggy half-implemented version of the BEAM”.

That is the essence of functional programming in the rough, yes. You have functions which take data as input and return some value as a result. So you could describe any / all functional programs in the way you have.

Where it gets more interesting in this case is in the details of the “how” with Elixir. For instance, querying a handful of data sources: this is trivial to do in parallel with Elixir by putting each query into its own process. You may choose to do this with one-off usage of Tasks, or you might create GenServers that are re-used between queries. You may even create a worker pool to limit the number of queries being made in parallel. (The latter is what Ecto does behind the scenes.)

Those processes would then preferably be monitored by a Supervisor (or by just manually linking, via spawn_link e.g.), so that if something goes wrong in one of them they can be restarted / retried, or even abort the parent process that is doing the top-level task.

Depending on the shape of the data being processed, the “arbitrary logic” you mention can be written elegantly using Elixir’s facilities for pattern matching, pipelining using the |> operator, etc.

You can then very easily turn that into a distributed application where a bunch of computers (high end servers or clusters of little RPi’s even) work on that task together.

So .. while you could describe it as a “ton of functions”, and you could literally write it that way, there is a lot more in the toolbox. Personally, that toolbox added on top of FP, great tooling, etc. is what makes Elixir so exciting.