28 Dec 2022
Started to learn a bit of Elixir today. I was going through the book “Elixir in Action” and found myself doing the same thing I always do: think the material is easy, go too far ahead to where it looks new, and then become confused because I don’t know the syntax whatsoever.
I caught myself early this time, though, and decided to do it a bit differently. Instead of reading from the book, I’ll learn by directly applying and working through the struggle. So, I am going to try to complete Advent of Code 2022 all in Elixir to see how it goes. It took me nearly 2 hours to solve the first puzzle - I felt like I was back in CS 101.
I like the language, though. I have also been interested in getting more acquainted with a functional programming language. It is elegant in its syntax. From peeking a bit ahead in the book, it also feels very powerful being built on top of Erlang and getting all the processing capability from there too.
The first step at being good at something is being bad at something.