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

Summary


In this chapter, we discussed a number of topics concerning Elixir and metaprogramming.

Typespecs are used as a means for documenting code (with code) such that other programmers (and ourselves) will know at a glance the expected types of certain functions. Typespecs are also a great tool for annotating code, functions, and modules for static analysis, and for finding type issues or other bugs typically unavailable to dynamically-typed languages.

Behaviours can be thought of akin to interfaces from OO languages. They are a means to define modules that will have a set of public functions with specific arity. If the modules adopting a behaviour do not define any or all of the functions from the behaviour, Elixir will raise a compiler warning.

Protocols are a means of performing high-level pattern matching and function dispatching for certain actions. For example, translating types into printable strings requires implementation of the String.Chars protocol for the specific type. This allows...