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

Building functional projects


We have a lot in our proverbial tool belt so far and we are adding more. Let's take a look at some more examples where we solve some relatively simple problems using Elixir. This time, however, let's use mix as well.

Flatten

We will start small, by creating a function to flatten arbitrarily deep, nested lists.

Let's create a project for it using mix new flatten:

$ mix new reverse
* creating README.md
* creating .gitignore
* creating mix.exs
* creating config
* creating config/config.exs
* creating lib
* creating lib/flatten.ex
* creating test
* creating test/test_helper.exs
* creating test/flatten_test.exs

Your mix project was created successfully.
You can use mix to compile it, test it, and more:

    cd flatten
    mix test

Run mix help for more commands.

Now, in the lib/flatten.ex file, let's create the flatten function.

Open the file in your favorite editor and add the following flatten/1 function:

defmodule Flatten do
  def flatten([]), do: []
  def flatten...