Book Image

Learning Elixir

By : Kenny Ballou, Kenneth Ballou
Book Image

Learning Elixir

By: Kenny Ballou, Kenneth Ballou

Overview of this book

Elixir, based on Erlang’s virtual machine and ecosystem, makes it easier to achieve scalability, concurrency, fault tolerance, and high availability goals that are pursued by developers using any programming language or programming paradigm. Elixir is a modern programming language that utilizes the benefits offered by Erlang VM without really incorporating the complex syntaxes of Erlang. Learning to program using Elixir will teach many things that are very beneficial to programming as a craft, even if at the end of the day, the programmer isn't using Elixir. This book will teach you concepts and principles important to any complex, scalable, and resilient application. Mostly, applications are historically difficult to reason about, but using the concepts in this book, they will become easy and enjoyable. It will teach you the functional programing ropes, to enable them to create better and more scalable applications, and you will explore how Elixir can help you achieve new programming heights. You will also glean a firm understanding of basics of OTP and the available generic, provided functionality for creating resilient complex systems. Furthermore, you will learn the basics of metaprogramming: modifying and extending Elixir to suite your needs.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning Elixir
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Elixir structure


So far, we haven't seen much more than tiny snippets, demonstrating a fraction of the syntax of Elixir. Now we are going to go into more detail and look at some more in-depth examples.

We will start with what may be considered a functional language's real "hello world", the map function.

Note

Note that this example will use some concepts that we are going to go into more detail in the next few chapters.

The map function essentially takes a function and a list, and applies the function to each element in the list. Ideally, the application of one element in the list does not depend or effect any other application of any other element. Thus, this is usually something that can be trivial (in concept) to parallelize. However, very few languages make it so easy as the functional languages, and in particular, Elixir.

Using what we know now (and some stuff we haven't covered), here's how we might write our own map function:

defmodule MyMap do
  def map([], _) do
    []
  end

  def map...