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

Domain-specific languages


Macros have the ability to create small, embedded languages for solving specific problems. Occasionally, certain problems are not well expressed in the current language, however, they would be very easily expressible in a new, smaller, and more precise language.

Usually, creating a new language requires steps through lexers, parsers, and evaluators to even get the language off the ground. However, macros can extend the current language facilities to accomplish creating an embedded DSL.

A notable DSL example using Elixir and macros is the Ecto project. The Ecto project attempts to provide a similar language to SQL in Elixir for querying data stores. Instead of writing the SQL yourself and passing it to the database connector and letting it execute, the problem of querying data can be expressed in natural terms of Elixir, which, in turn, would be compiled to SQL and sent to the database.

For example, instead of having to write the following query to grab weather data...