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

Flow-based programming


Let's move on to discuss another topic that isn't necessarily new, but is recently making a stir in the programming world.

Flow-based programming or programming with pipes is a way of specifying and solving particular problems in terms of a flow and a connection of interconnected units. At its basis, flow-based programming defines a sequence of operations that will be performed. Each element in the sequence (of computation) defines a specific computation, and computes and passes to the next in the sequence. Ignoring types for a moment, each unit is independent of each other. Each can be modified without dramatically affecting other components in the flow.

Flow-based programming inherently requires the immutability constructs of functional programming because each element that will be computed over the flow, must be computable without interaction of other elements of the original set. That is, we take some collection of elements, and for each element, pass the element...