[marcstreeter]

In all seriousness, if you want to learn Elixir, learn Erlang.

Couldn't we have said the same thing about Objective-C with regard to C? I'm not trying to be confrontational, just trying to understand why anyone would say that one should learn the foundation instead of the abstraction? It would be nice to have some concrete reasons delineated or even referenced. I have been searching to find them because I've more than once come across the above criticism, but I've never been able to find anything besides gut reactions. If there are any real obstacles the smarter among you perceive then I'd like to know to avoid them.

[thibaut_barrere]

why anyone would say that one should learn the foundation instead of the abstraction?

Again just one data point (not trying to generalize!), but since I started programming (circa 1985), this has always been a common confrontation point in the various (diverse) communities I've been part of.

In the demo-making world for instance, some people considered that Assembler was the only way to implement something "properly" ("real programmers use asm"), vs people picking C, C++ or even TurboPascal which could still optimize a given loop with Assembler when needed only.

It happens that some (but not all!) programmers with a long experience (15y+) end up considering that without knowing exactly how things work underneath in detail, you won't be able to ship anything.

I think it's a mixture of "fear to be obsolete" and other psychological factors. Despite this I've personally seen a couple of people with 1 to 2y of programming experience ship viable products.

Not everybody needs to know Ralf Brown's interrupt list by heart today :-)

[autoreleasepool]

> Couldn't we have said the same thing about Objective-C with regard to C?

You do, in fact, have to learn enough C before you can learn Objective-C though. The smalltalk part of the language is completely bolted on top of C and you work with C APIs all the time in Cocoa development (even when you use Swift).