It is tedious alright. But I still try my best to use guards and limit what I receive even in my private functions.

Since Elixir is not statically typed and never will be – and since I want to use Elixir almost everywhere in my work – I compensate with guards and pattern-matching so as to catch errors as early as possible. Never again will I just catch the root of all exceptions (like many Java devs do) and just turn a blind eye to weak spots in the code.

BTW don’t forget about the relatively new defguard construct. It made my stricter code look cleaner.

You can use them as a complement to a patternmatch (edit: qqwy already named that, example:)

  defp get_task(%{:type => a} = element, socket) when a in ["exclusiveGateway","parallelGateway"],
    do:  get_tasks_after_element(element.id, socket)

I use guards in two cases:

1. To help with pattern-matching when I have multiple functions. Usually these functions are then ‘complete’ (as opposed to ‘partial’ functions).
2. To constrain the input types of the functions, especially when they are part of the public API of whatever it is I am writing.