sodapopcan
I’ve been in the Elixir world for five years—not super long but also not super short. In this time I have seen lots of code that uses elem/2 but not once have I ever seen a situation where it made code clearer and in fact has always made code less clear. It seems its main use it to “not break pipelines.” To put it lightly: this is a non-goal. I have never run into a situation where pattern matching isn’t way way way waaaaaaaay clearer than elem/2, even if it means breaking the pipe.
IMO if we ever see an Elixir 2.0 this function should be removed from the language. But please tell me why elem/2 is indispensable to your Elixir work! I realize I’m using very dismissive language but I’m genuinely curious if there is a good use-case for it I’ve never thought of.
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zachallaun
An example from a project I contribute to:
Lexical.Document.LinesThe key insight is that a tuple provides O(1) access to any of its elements, whereas a list is O(n). So if you need a data structure that provides fast access to any arbitrary line of a document, you reach for a tuple. (And then you use
elem/2for access, since you don’t know what its length will be.)Also Liked
dorgan
I think it makes sense to have such a function be part of the standard library. The reasoning is quite simple: if you provide a builtin data structure, it makes sense to provide an API to read and write to it.
Wether or not it’s idiomatic to access a random element of a tuple is a whole different topic.
dimitarvp
Agreed, but it has to be noted that
then– which solves the problem of not breaking pipelines – was only added in Elixir 1.12.Use
then.sodapopcan
Everyone is always free to go off topic in any thread I create
Last Post!
slouchpie
That is weird. I have the same behavior. I can not let this go. Why does
:pubnot “tab out” to:public? There must be a reason.Update: I think I got it
Any module that is Application “kernel” or “stdlib” or “erts” will tab out.
Otherwise it will not.
:public_keyis in its own “public_key” application.Similarly,
:pretty_pr,:os_supand:release_handlerwill not tab out.