Why choose Elixir for software development

Elixir is growing among the web and software development community across the world. Here are some reasons to use Elixir for backend development. Learn more.

Elixir is one of the best functional programming language that is taking over the web and software development on the whole. Today, more and more companies are using Elixir based frameworks to build some highly scalable applications.

Elixir’s strength comes from its reliability, speed of development and above all, performance of the web applications. In this article, let us try to capture the importance of using Elixir for your software development activities and why;

What is Elixir

Elixir is a functional programming language highly influenced by Erlang. Since Elixir uses Erlang’s VM, it is easy to develop low-latency, fault-tolerant and highly efficient software applications.

Over the past few years, Elixir based framework is being used in places where there is a lot of data flow between the users and the servers. By now, chances are that you have already used at least one of the products that take advantage of Elixir.

Some of the big names in the consumer software industry like Netflix, Pinterest, and Discord are already using Elixir in production to manage millions of requests with very few servers serving them.

Should you build products on Elixir now?

Whenever a new programming language comes up in the industry, two things happen:

1. There are these people who relent again new languages and ask people to focus on the existing ones (which we think limits creativity and innovation);
2. Developers are not willing to jump ship to these new programming languages unless large companies like Netflix or Pinterest start adopting them.

With Elixir, the fear or not knowing the future of the language pretty much got over when Pinterest made a move to Elixir to handle millions of requests on their site.

Here are two simple reasons why you can move to Elixir right now:

1. Erlang is old; Elixir is based on Erlang VM and is highly interoperable in case you change your mind;
2. Community support is incredible where people using Elixir for different use-cases have validated the stability of Elixir for web development or using Elixir for general software development.

What is the connection between Elixir and Ruby

People who were programming on Ruby earlier, are increasingly moving to Elixir. The growth comes since Elixir literally offers an easy way to write code (which is very developer friendly), as well as give teams the performance they need. Let me explain.

Why Elixir over Ruby While this is not a conversation of the greatness of a language, this is purely about the performance, availability and scalability of the language;

1. Elixir is a compiled language, this allows your code to directly take advantage of all the CPU cores without wasting any resources;
2. Elixir is flexible to write business logic, almost like the same way Ruby offers its developers, but with performance;
3. Elixir is smoother on your servers; your code now has the capability to serve millions of users, without breaking the servers, which might not be possible with Ruby;
4. Elixir demands code-quality; for any software developer who wants to write not just good, but great code, Elixir’s syntax and structure demands you to write only great code;

Where are we suggesting Elixir

Banks and Government agencies; I know its kind of weird for these type of companies to look into programming languages like Elixir, but these are the companies who can benefit the maximum out of Elixir web or software applications.

Both banks and governments handle millions of transactions per second. Be it the banking transaction or the data governments are collecting for various billing purposes. Building middleware with Elixir can add two major values to them:

1. Help cut server costs;
2. Maintain great code quality that can run for a long time;

Functional programming is a proven method to write great quality software that stands the sands of time. Which is what banks need.

If you are person supporting a bank, you gotta try Elixir for your internal software at least. It is going to add a ton of measurable value when done right.

How do I get started with Elixir

If you are a manager looking to talk more about the value Elixir can add to your organization, just hit us up on our contact us page, we will help you out.

If you are a developer, just head over to the official Elixir website to learn about the language.

Why great code matters

Only very few companies in the world appreciate great quality code. Many shush away this practice and follow the hustle culture when programming, which is nothing but designing for failure in the future.

Great quality code is something that works for a long time without having to touch anything and that can communicate to another developer who might join the team new.

At Skcript, the team is obsessed with writing great quality code, which is exactly what the company was founded on – which is to build products using technology that progresses the world for the better.

What do you think of Elixir? Have you used it in your production environment? Let’s have a convo on this. Hit us up on Twitter.

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