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

Obligatory discussion about distributed computing


 

"Distributed computing is hard"

 
 --Everyone

This quote, of course, is a bit hyperbolic. It's not necessarily the case that distributed computing is hard, it's mainly that there are far more edge cases and other assumptions we must shed before being able to proceed. This section won't attempt to be an exhaustive list of concepts and topics in distributed computing, but it will discuss what is most applicable to understanding OTP and developing distributed applications with Elixir.

Fallacies of distributed computing

Let's briefly discuss the 8 fallacies of distributed computing. By understanding the (false) assumptions of distributed computing, we can understand the assumptions made by Elixir and OTP, and how to leverage them.

The network is reliable

Often when designing distributed applications, developers will assume that the network will always be available and therefore, they will place themselves into strange and interesting failure modes...