What do you LOVE about Elixir?

1. Macros are significantly better than Erlang’s version (OhGodErlangASTHell).
2. It runs on the BEAM.
3. It fully inter-operates with Erlang

Perhaps we should have a thread of things in Elixir we want to see changed? ^.^

The big picture things I love:

1. a sane concurrency model
2. veteran libraries giving higher-level concurrency abstractions
3. fault tolerance

The smaller, localized things I love:

1. pattern matching
2. immutability
3. “acceptable lisp” macro system

A lot of the reasons I love it are really just what I love about Erlang.

The Elixir-specific reasons (aside from macros) are that it’s just a well designed language: Almost everything you need from a standard library is there and implemented right. The developer tools are great andthe non-Erlang abstractions and syntaxes are right.

It’s a language you can tell was done right and with care.

In the grand scheme of things:

1. Great and nice commmunity that tries new things and can create new paradigms
2. Parallelism from the ground up baked into everything and all of that with Actors
3. Explicit over implicit (after being burned a bit in Ruby/Rails with quite some of the implicitness)
4. A nice gateway into functional programming and OTP/reliability/distributed systems
5. High level of trust into Jose and his views and experience about web programming

More focussed specifically on the language:

1. Pattern matching, single feature I’d love to have in Ruby and other languages and that I accidentally code my ruby code with and then realize I don’t have the feature
2. Doctesting build in. I just LOVE this for coding and documentation, doesn’t get enough love imo
3. Cool macro system as imo runtime meta programming isn’t needed so at compile time with a good system is great
4. Nice standard library/familiar from ruby

Some great points already posted

Just want to quickly comment on this..

Very glad you mentioned that! Totally blown away by how easy it is to test in Elixir!

I think we definitely need to scream from the roof-tops about this - I can’t see anyone not loving this aspect of Elixir

big fat ones

• pattern matching
• pipes
• Erlang VM with all its goodies and OTP

further niceties in no particular order

• standard library has a lot to offer and the docs are nice
• tools are good out of the box - project and package management, testing, doctests, Erlang’s observer
• community is very active and friendly
• there is Phoenix around
• less code to write
• macros are a nice to have, even when I try not to use them unless I really need to

I really love the fact, that documentation is considered “first class” and available at runtime.

And since @AstonJ asked for a slogan… “Once you got it, it gets you”[1]

[1] Explanation: After I got at least some concepts in OTP I have problems to think in the more classical stuff. A project where I realized this was written in go. After about a week I took a step back and have seen things that try to act as Supervisors or GenServers, but still very crumpy…

What I love most about Elixir I also love about Erlang/OTP.

On top of that we get an improved core library, easy-to-navigate documentation, and best of all a standard build tool, package manager, and testing library. This, combined with OTP conventions, makes it easy to dive into any Elixir project to learn/use/share/modify.

In addition, I’ve found the Elixir core team to be very friendly, accessible, and responsive to feedback.

1. Pattern matching, I love this a lot.
2. All the features of erlang, I love how easy it is to use erlang and all its features.
3. Love phoenix.
4. Love the idea of being explicit, I think as programmers mature, they really don’t want surprises
5. Macros! I love them to death.

BEAM/OTP
Interop with Erlang
friendly community
pattern matching
pipes
fast pace of progress