it is no secret that the appeal of elixir is in large part the amalgam of two historical programming paradigms. at the risk of grotesque over-simplification, elixir is just erlang re-written in ruby. josé valim is explicit on this point. and why not? syntactically and semantically, ruby was crafted for developer happiness. that happiness is real—just try method chaining. erlang, meanwhile, is often remarked as a weird language, difficult to internalize for unfamiliar eyes.

 but the weirdness of erlang—itself deriving from the great ancient wisdom of prolog—brings me even more joy than ruby's prettiness. i don't agree that readability is only equivalent to familiarity (in ruby's case, to english-language grammar). i agree more with fred hebert, who celebrates erlang for its "texture". clunkiness is something you can grasp, too.

 and so but in recent months i've become very affectionate of the squarely pragmatic look and functional feel of this old secret-weapon of svensk telekom. i study the language daily, whenever i have a free moment, and am hell-bent on working in the language either professionally or privately, but certainly indefinitely. as i make these strides, i can also act as an advocate and archivist for the many technical and philosophical gems left by joe armstrong et al. one of my first actions is to create a github repository for the more peculiar erlang i have encountered. i am calling the repo "hello joe" (in reference to the cult classic "erlang: the movie"), and will be adding to it as frequently as feasible. example program number one is from joe's "non-linear personal web notebook": a "universal server". enjoy. keep programming weird.