A senior developer from our team Shoplifters says the following about what the Elixir Squad is currently working on:

“The Elixirsquad is currently working on the implementation of new features for our e-commerce platform such as a compatibility search for SmartHome devices from different manufacturers. Not all of the products listed here can actually be ordered via the connected store systems, but rather serve as a general planning aid for the end customer when selecting products. However, finding and identifying planning errors and bugs and working out a solution for them is also a constant item within the team.”

I asked the same Shoplifters member what is the greatest potential of Elixir and Phoenix:

“Elixir and Phoenix provide us with powerful tools to investigate the topics mentioned. Despite the rather dynamic nature of the language at first glance, the ecosystem provides us with powerful tools for static analysis to identify even the not quite obvious module dependencies, even in a complex system like our platform backends, and to develop strategies for solving problems based on this. At least that's where the potential lies from a developer's point of view. The economist will like the fact that Elixir allows a relatively compact programming method, which can do without unrecoverable error handling to a large extent and can nevertheless work fail-safe and error-tolerant, if one keeps to basic rules in relation to the "process supervision".

Finally, I asked him what advice he had in store for Elixir newbies:

„Elixir is not an object-oriented language, even if it has adopted many syntactic elements from Ruby, the semantics behind it are quite different. Please take this to heart, and don't try to find a substitute for objects and classes in processes and "actors".”