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Comment by salex89 | Hacker News Reader

I have not used Erlang or Elixir, and wanted to start with Elixir (I want some experience with a functional language, I'm to biased with Java to use Scala as a functional language). However, I read somewhere that Elixir can be successfully used only with Phoenix if you don't know Erlang. As I understood, sooner than later interactions with Erlang libraries is needed, and that requires Erlang knowledge. Can somebody please confirm? That Elixir is basically oriented around Phoenix and Erlang is a requirement?

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I'm not sure who told you that, but it's patently false. Phoenix is just another OTP application, you can build a Phoenix app without knowing Erlang at all. It is a practical reality that you will eventually dig into Erlang to some degree, but I wouldn't say it's a requirement by any means. Perhaps what was meant is that you will need to understand OTP, the Erlang standard library (because Elixir avoids wrapping it as much as possible), and some of the semantics of Erlang interop such as the binaries vs charlists, the use of records instead of structs, etc. For just getting started though, much of that can be avoided, and you can tackle it as the need arises.

Thanks. I'm not sure where I read, it was probably some article or comment here on HN. That's what I wanted to hear, it is possible to attend to those issues on-the-fly.

I think the Erlang question is misleading perhaps, because using erlang functions in elixir doesn't actually involve/require learning erlang... any erlang function is available to call directly from Elixir, generally just namespaced under an atom, like :crypto.block_decrypt(:aes_cbc256, key, iv, cipehrtext) You don't have to "know erlang", just read some docs and make a slightly different syntax function call.

Start with elixir. The syntax is easy enough to learn. Once you get the hang of it learning erlang will be quite simple. You won't be a pro but you'll be able to look at a file and get the basic idea of what it does. Besides syntax they are very similar module-based languages.

Phoenix is really nice but you don't need it for web applications. The Plug library has everything you need if you want to roll your own.

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