Polymorphism in Elixir

I admit, I’m having a bit of trouble giving helpful advice on this one.

Your goal, as I understand it, is to reduce Ecto boilerplate, and you’re also, in a sense, extending Ecto’s macro system. Within your project, I don’t see a problem, except that it introduces a bit of indirection that you’ll need to make sure your colleagues understand.

From the perspective of protocols, what hung me up is that I was looking for the polymorphism problem you were solving, but in the end, I think you’re using the protocol more as a contract.

Is this generalizable? I see some tight coupling to your domain, so my answer would be probably not, but I might be misunderstanding.

Is there another way to solve it? Sure. But you’re approaching it from a Ruby context, and I don’t have enough Ruby experience to say whether there’s a better alternative through that lens.

I would say protocols are for datatype polymorphism, often to get similar behaviour from different input data. Behaviours are for functional polymorphism, often to get different implementation details from similar contracts. Both can solve similar problems but have their own idiomatic wood grains to cut with or against.

Both involve functions accepting dynamic input that changes how the program executes: just as a function that accepts dynamic data may invoke a protocol to get different results, a function that accepts a dynamic module may invoke a behaviour to get different results.

Generally, unless we are doing supervision stuff/adapter work, our applications want to act similarly on different data more than we want them to act differently on similar interfaces, which is more of a library concern. Additionally, the type system and dialyzer work well enough with dynamic data types but dynamic modules is currently more of a black box for editor experiences. So I’d say the average application has more reason to be concerned with protocols than behaviours in practice, despite both mechanisms being open for extension in some sense to application developers.

But I would disagree with the claim that behaviours are not a mechanism for polymorphism; just a mechanism with different and less-common aims. I think my first paragraph there is a half-remembered direct quote from José, I’ll see if I can find the source. Some keynote maybe?

We’re probably just interpreting the term “polymorphism” a bit differently. I’m using the Strachey definition, where the runtime selects behavior based on the type of the input. Under that (admittedly narrow) lens, behaviours don’t quite fit, since the caller selects the module explicitly. But in the end, it’s probably just semantics.