Is Elixir more understandable and easy to learn than Python?

Well, sure, if you’re looking for a dedicated teacher that’s a different story.

What kind of things are you googling in Ruby that you can’t find in Elixir?? Other than that Ruby uses a lot of “functional methods” they aren’t exactly alike (well, and the look of the syntax, of course).

From a quick glance at the jobs board, a lot of Senior positions require 3-4 years of software engineering experience overall.

If that is what passes for senior, then perhaps one shouldn’t be too intimidated by the title. Don’t let it stop you from applying.

I hear that your experience learning Elixir hasn’t been as easy as with other languages and I share your frustration that there are very few junior/mid level jobs. That doesn’t mean everyone else has a hard time learning it or finding a job. People click with different paradigms and learn differently. Personally, I came from Python and .NET because I could not understand how to build an application with their concurrency models. Millions of other people manage to do so and that’s great for them. Also, I was pretty inexperienced in programming at the time. I’m certainly not the only person with this background.

Sure, there are less junior Elixir jobs around, but that was not what Ann was asking about. One could assume from their post that they’re not even interested in getting a job.

Python is a toy language, Elixir isn’t

It’s not misguided at all.

Comparing one of the top 3 in demand languages with something that doesn’t even make the top 10+ and assuming they have similar resources levels is what’s misguided. It’s not hard to learn the basic syntax of any language, but learning practical applications in Elixir as a person new to coding is significantly more difficult than learning one of the more popular languages.

I don’t know JQuery, but if I need to do JQuery I’m 99% sure I can do it because it’s always just a google away. Elixir doesn’t have that luxury. I sometimes google how to do things in Ruby because I know it’s more likely to get me a result than how to do it in Elixir. Learning resources are an important part of learning, and Elixir has far fewer learning resources than Python so it is not as easy to learn.

If you have a dedicated teacher its a whole different story though, but as a random on the internet they aren’t the same difficulty.

Didn’t say anyone can’t learn it, I said the path to being a dev in Elixir seems to start at a senior level. It’s not really an ‘entry’ level language if you want to start a career in programming. You’re welcome to send me a load of junior level job advertisements if you disagree.

Thats the main reason we are all on this forum You have to get through python or to fully appreciate elixir.

I mean, there’s an argument to made to not learn Python at all and I think you may have just made it

Both may be similar to pick up at the beginning. But I think there is one problem for future devs:
When you learn python, elixir will be easy to learn.
When you learn elixir, python will be hard to learn.
Elixir is simpler, has smaller standard library and mostly one way to most of the stuff.
In python the standard library is huge with sometimes duplicated functionalities and on top of that it has recommended packages for different tasks that do the same as standard library stuff. There are multiple ways to structure your code, multiple web frameworks, multiple testing libraries and so on. Some libraries are more oop focused, some more functional. This may be confusing but it will teach you different ways the code may work. Going from python to elixir you’ll feel that it’s well structurized and easy to pick up. Other way around will make you feel like starting learning from the beginning because you will jump to bigger stuff and not the basics anymore.

Not to mention the SO space is VERY polluted by confused people going between 2 and 3. loads of stuff that ranks very high on google doesnt work or works wrong in subtle ways on python.

Also a lot more «black magic box» libraries, which is great if you are senior and know how to iterate fast and safe, not so great if you are trying to learn.