Studying Notes on Elixir

Elixir is a Erlang VM (BEAM) based language (http://elixir-lang.org/). This post serves as a note and thoughts while exploring this language.

On Installation

1. It is much easier to install Erlang and Elixir via Homebrew, if you are using Mac, you definitely should consider this route

brew install elixir
brew install erlang

On Syntax

1. true and :true are the same, same goes to false and :false. These have data type of booleans
2. Constants, or symbols are called atoms. For example :hello is an atom.
3.  The atom version of booleans (i.e. :true and :false) are special cases, and will be treated as booleans.  As can be shown below by the interactive output of Elixir. Note :hello is an atom, but not a boolean
iex(7)> is_boolean :true
true
iex(8)> is_boolean :false
true
iex(9)> is_atom :true
true
iex(10)> is_atom :false
true
iex(11)> is_boolean :hello
false
iex(12)> is_atom :hello