AstonJ

AstonJ

How has Elixir blown (or expanded!) your mind? Please tell us here!

Can be something that’s unique to Elixir, or just something that it introduced to you. Can be something you discovered a while ago.. or something you just come across - whatever it is, please share :023:

Showing Posts 1 to 10

AstonJ

AstonJ OP

Well it was mind blowing enough when I first came across recursive functions, but I’m just reading Learn Functional Programming with Elixir (Pragprog) and I’ve just met a recursive function …inside a recursive function :icon_eek: :003: :lol:

Crowdhailer

Crowdhailer

Creator of Raxx

This might be a little bit tangential. Finding this in the OTP source really blew my mind. Make me realise even the most impressive software is made by normal people

https://github.com/erlang/otp/blob/52c11d5afd18405eaa293bb881eddf23f408850f/lib/stdlib/src/gen.erl#L240-L243

brightball

brightball

Completely changed the way I think about code…which is kind of a pain when I have to use other languages…

19
Post #3
voger

voger

Things that I had heard of but I was scared to try. Recursive functions. Enum.reduce and Enum.map functions. I have seen those in javascript but I was avoiding them over for loops.

kylethebaker

kylethebaker

This talk by Saša Juric is one of my go-to’s when trying to get people interested in Elixir. Being able to attach a REPL to a running production system and having all of these introspection capabilities at your disposal is something I don’t think any other runtime offers (or if they do it likely isn’t as deeply integrated with the runtime as you get with elixir/erlang).

15
Post #5
JoshHadik96

JoshHadik96

This is a simple one but my mind was blown when I first saw this line of code:

“def calculate(arr) when length(arr) <= 1 do”

I’ve never seen conditional declaration of functions before. Still haven’t gotten over how cool it is

idi527

idi527

def calculate(arr) when length(arr) <= 1, do: # ...

could be expressed as

def calculate([]), do: # ...
def calculate([elem]), do: # ...

which is a bit easier to understand (at least for me, since I can’t think of a function which would handle both an empty list and a list with a single element in it the same way), and probably slightly faster.

andre1sk

andre1sk

Not specifically Elixir but BEAM’s preemptive scheduler especially after working a lot with Node is truly mind blowing.

oldpond

oldpond

I am constantly blown away by how so much is achieved by so little code. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

JoshHadik96

JoshHadik96

Haha new to the forum so I’m not used to where everything is and I definitely thought your username was the opening to your comment for a second or two :joy:

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