Over the last 6 months or so a good friend of mine has learned to code from scratch. After much deliberation I took a gamble and set him up with Elixir as his first language (largely because he wanted to code so he can work with me on some projects, which use Elixir).

I am really happy with this choice and so is he. Elixir is a language with very consistent ideas throughout and I think concepts like functional transformations, immutability, pattern matching and actor based concurrency are both extremely useful to learn early and very accessible to beginners in Elixir.

Edit:

I didn't think of it when I wrote this comment, but I think the single most helpful thing for beginners (and me!) in Elixir, is the 'h' function. If you run it with any function as an argument in iex (Elixir's repl) you'll get documentation and an example of how to use that function:

  iex(2)> h Enum.map

                              def map(enumerable, fun)

  Returns a list where each item is the result of invoking fun on each
  corresponding item of enumerable.

  For maps, the function expects a key-value tuple.

  ## Examples

      iex> Enum.map([1, 2, 3], fn(x) -> x * 2 end)
      [2, 4, 6]

      iex> Enum.map([a: 1, b: 2], fn({k, v}) -> {k, -v} end)
      [a: -1, b: -2]