First taste of Elixir

Let’s create new Elixir project:

mix new first_taste
code first_taste

Open terminal in VS Code and run interactive Elixir shell:

iex.bat -S mix

On windows you need to run iex.bat instead of iex as iex is used by PowerShell as alias for Invoke-Expression.

You should see something like this:

Erlang/OTP 28 [erts-16.1] [source] [64-bit] [smp:22:22] [ds:22:22:10] [async-threads:1] [jit:ns]

Compiling 1 file (.ex)
Generated first_taste app
Interactive Elixir (1.18.4) - press Ctrl+C to exit (type h() ENTER for help)
iex(1)>

Modules

Everything in Elixir and Erlang is organized in modules. To distinguish between Elixir and Erlang modules, Elixir modules are in CamelCase and Erlang modules are in :snake_case.

Let’s see what modules are available:

:code.all_available()
:erlang.module_info(:exports)
Logger.module_info(:exports)

You can call functions in live system as in the OS terminal, which is very useful for debugging.