I’m happy to see that people are (thinking about) using Elixir to teach programming!
We at UCLL at Belgium are using Elixir to teach the courses Internetprogramming Major and Distributed applications. The students already have a background of OO programming (and html, css, etc…). It is interesting to see the mistakes they are making, such as:
- Even after a few weeks, some students still try to manipulate data instead of transform it
- if statements. They’re everywhere!
- pattern matching is a challenge
- recursive functions seem to be a big hurdle to overcome.
- They’re not used to solving things with higher order functions. Their most trusted tool (the for loop) is gone, and they try to use the for comprehension to manipulate data, which fails quite often. It is my personal opinion, but I try to forbid using that for comprehension and suggest them to use an higher order function as it only confuses them.
- GenServer: messages (specifically cast messages) are used as setters, which results in messages everywhere! Invalid states and crashes are the result of this. Good thing they have a supervisor…
Those are just some of the more common ones. If I can help in any way, feel free to ask!
Regards,
Wannes
