amacgregor
Exploring design patterns in Elixir
I wanted to reach out to the community and see who is using design patterns and what are the ones that are relevant to FP and Elixir, as well as an overall discussion on the validity and applicability of patterns.
Now, let me start with a couple of statements that might be valuable (I might be wrong; feel free to comment):
- Design patterns are not recipes, meaning their value is not to be implemented to the letter
- Most Creational and Structural patterns have little to no use in the functional programming world.
- For FP and Elixir, the most valuable and applicable patterns are going to be architectural and behavioral
Within that realm, there are a few patterns that I have identified that seem useful:
- Circuit Breaker for managing calls to external services
- Event Sourcing for situations that require a highly reliable audit log; CQRS is also relevant
Curious what else is being used and tried for example Sagas? Proxy? Strategy? Maybe some unique to Functional languages?
Most Liked Responses
tomekowal
There is the Token pattern that is very common in many Elixir libraries. Designing Token APIs for Architecting Flow in Elixir · rrrene
I had a talk on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arYOSYrjC8s but I didn’t know the name yet 
kokolegorille
I have been translating this book…
…from Node to Elixir
I really like DDD and Event sourcing, I feel Elixir is a good fit for this kind of reactive programming.
It’s not a pattern, but I like to define domain events first.
al2o3cr
A good place to start is the OTP Design Principles User’s Guide which describes the supervision and communication patterns used by the OTP + BEAM infrastructure.
One technique that’s seems a lot more common in languages with pattern matching is defunctionalization (and another presentation) - note that both of these require a little Haskell to fully understand the examples, but it looks kinda like Erlang.
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