They’re mainly Ruby developers, but also some front-end developers want to study it. I have been writing Elixir full-time for about a year, but I came to it from Ruby. As you probably know, Elixir was created by a former Ruby developer, José Valim, and his idea was to keep the beautiful syntax of Ruby in Elixir.

Instead of initializing a variable in the function, we add one more argument to the function. Then we call it again and again, each time decreasing times and increasing acc. We can define an x-argument function that will serve as the outer shell of our function.

Function heads

One of these functions in Elixir-speak is actually add/2, the other is add/3. In other words, you can overload functions via arity. Let’s say we need to read a list of lines from a file, make them into exclamation sentences, and print them out to the console. Pattern matching works in function parameters too.

Elixir based program executes on Erlang VM. Therefore, it is required to have Erlang on your local machine. Some platform supplies Elixir package along with Erlang. Given below is the link through which Elixir can be downloaded. This knowledge (and a bit of Googling, I definitely didn’t cover everything) should be enough for you to go through Exercism and be able to do simple programs in Elixir. Each module can have one and only one struct, and we tend to define it somewhere at the top of the module. In Elixir, we use recursion much more frequently than you would in a non-FP language since we don’t have access to things like loops.

You can access list-related functionality with the built-in List module. You can access string-related functionality with the built-in String module. A variable can store any data type; it is not restricted to the examples above. The constructs if and case are actually expressions in both Erlang and Elixir, but may be used for control flow as in imperative languages. When defining a function with the same name multiple times, each such definition is called a clause.

Elixir supports pattern matching in function clauses. Therefore, instead of writing long-winded control flow statements, you can create multiple functions. Also, elixir programming language relies on underscores in order to make functions private to the modules. For example, if we want to create our own iterable data structure and use it via Enum module, we need to implement all interface functions from the Enumerable protocol. Then we can work with our custom type using Enum module.

🗺️ What to learn next?

Elixir provides functions rem and div for working with integer division and remainder. You can also install Elixir onto your computer and then run elixir files (.ex) directly. The 20% of Elixir syntax you need to read 80% of Elixir code.

We can define functions with names so we can easily refer to them later. Named functions are defined within a module using the def keyword . We’ll learn more about Modules in the next lessons, for now we’ll focus on the named functions alone.

But sometimes Erlang code is harder to change, because it uses semicolons and commas for statement separation. Also, Elixir derived syntax from Ruby, which made it very appealing for any Ruby developer. Erlang has C-like macros – so it’s just a dumb text generation. It also has a very cumbersome parse-transform engine. Parse-transform allows you to make a lot of stuff, but amount of efforts is huge and extension can be very brittle.

• Let’s say that we want to duplicate a string any given number of times.
• The subject of the function is always the first argument.
• Any kind of control flow that you write, it’s a reasonable heuristic to check whether you can’t do it with pattern matching.
• Erlang code looks very similar to a normal mathematical notation, while Elixir is more verbose.

You’ll notice that modules are CapitalCase and functions are snake_case. Modules provide a way to organize the behavior of your program. For example, you might have a Greeting module with a say_hello function to return “Hello”. You can access map-related functionality with the built-in Map module.

Function syntax

Pattern matching isn’t limited to just variables in Elixir, it can be applied to function signatures as we will see in this section. I’m trying to implement a usefull but simple custom Elixir syntax highlighting for Notepad++. Exercism has a wonderful example in the robot simulator exercise. In it, you create a struct that holds the position and direction of a robot and provide various functions for moving and turning the robot.

So whereas Scala can do things Java can’t do , there really is nothing Elixir can do that Erlang can’t. Being able to use all of erlang’s inbuilt Native Mobile App Development modules and functions are an advantage. Tl;dr I need to use more dynamically typed functional languages to really appreciate posts like this.

String

This is used in Ecto and Phoenix to provide means for third-party libraries to extend a range of different supported types without changing original libraries. It adds a few sane default conventions for things like documentation, testing, and private/public visibility in modules. This chapter will focus on ensuring that Elixir is installed and that you can successfully run Elixir’s Interactive Shell, called IEx.

If it is, unassigned variables on the left side get assigned the values from the right side. If it is not, it will skip to the next match statement (or give you MatchError if the match wasn’t exhaustive). Elixir, as a functional programming language, makes heavy use of higher-order functions. Learning a new programming language can be challenging. There’s frequently a load of novel code patterns, techniques, and features.

Let’s imagine we wanted to get the age only if Andrew is of legal age. We can easily accomplish this with a guard, an additional construction that augments pattern matching. Basically, pattern matching works by providing some pattern you expect in the data and then checking whether this pattern matches the data. Skip this section and move on to data types if you already know how to run elixir code. Behind the scenes, functions are pattern-matching the arguments that they’re called with.

Also, there are brilliant Enum and Stream modules which unify work with lists, maps and other iterables. And they’re only partially covered by Erlang stdlib. Another issue with binaries is that Erlang doesn’t have a decent library for working with them as as it does for strings. https://bitcoin-mining.biz/ Of course, you can roll-out your hand-made solution, but it’s a big pain and fragmentation, because nobody would know an API of your library. Also, regexps in Erlang are supported only as a library. There is no operators and first-class support in syntax for them.