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

Functional algorithms for everyday problems


Now that we have seen modules, functions, guards, the basic types of the previous chapter, and some basic examples of pattern matching, we essentially have everything we need to start solving problems. Let's take this further and actually write some code!

Let's solve some basic problems such as those you might find in your standard set of interview questions; however, instead of solving them with imperative code, we are going to see how we can solve them using only functional constructs and what we have covered so far.

Iteration versus recursion

Often in functional languages, we will use recursion instead of iteration since iteration, by its very nature, requires side-effects. That is, to use a for loop, most languages require that the loop modifies some state (usually, an integer) to keep track of where the loop is in execution.

Functional languages, contrastingly, opt for recursive strategies since these are (or, at the very least, can be) inherently...