[scop]

I think there are two things going on:

1. The syntax is significantly different than what one may be used to. Fair enough. 2. The paradigm itself is different and thus requires you to learn way of structuring your code in some pretty fundamental ways. This is a much bigger deal than one may initially give it credit for. For example, pattern matching. The mere possibility of defining multiple versions of the same functions based on the number and kind of arguments completely changes how one writes functions.

Instead of:

function hello(x) {

if (x == 2) {

// do x

} else {

// do y

}

}

We can write:

def hello(2) do

# do x

end

def hello(_) do

# do y

end

This was very disruptive to my brain at first as I was not used to reading code in this manner. My brain said "find function, read definition" but it had to learn "find function with proper arity and arguments, read definition". It's hard to put into words, but this made understanding Elixir code feel more difficult at first. However, once I did sink my teeth in , start to maneuver around code bases, and write my own modules it is hard for me to "unsee it" and go back to anything else. I love it! I think the most mind-blowing moment was when I started to pull back the covers in Phoenix and discovered that the framework wasn't some magical black box of FancilyNamedProviders but was just a collection of functions that I could actually read my way through quite simply. I never had to stop and say "wait what did that FacadeOfGoodness do again" but just traced simple functions.