TL;DR

There is a lot of discussion in the software testing community about programming languages. We start a series of posting about two functional programming languages as we are learning them. So you can learn along with us.

I heard about Elixir and Elm in 2016 when I wrote the first none production line of codes in these languages. What is so special about them? Elixir is a server-side functional programming language, while Elm is a front-end functional programming language. They are both based on the Ruby syntax paradigm. While Ruby runtime is not the fastest or the most stable, Ruby has the most elegant syntax. Can you guess what following code would do:

You are correct, testers are the list, and that one-liner would print all testers from the list.

Functional programming languages do not have classes and objects. In functional programming languages, everything is about functions.

The most important feature for functional programming languages is no side effects on values. What goes into function could not be changed in that function. Instead, the function returns the new value. Always returns the new value.

Elixir compiles to Erlang, while Elm compiles to Javascript. But first thing first. We all use different operating systems, and to install Elixir or Elm, you need to follow different procedures. In next post, we will introduce you with an exciting tool called asdf. That tool helps developers to install various software and their versions on their development machine in almost the same manner across different operating systems.