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 ![]()
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A little off-topic, but I feel like people here have a good head on their shoulders.
I used to be quite good at making software. Was luc...
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Hi there! :wave:
@frigidcode and I (but mostly him) have been running an Elixir Book club, we’re almost done with Designing Elixir Syste...
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There has been a thread to discuss the Stack Overflow Developer Survey on this forum every year since 2018, so here’s yet another one for...
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I’ve been using Emacs as my main code editor for more than a two years. It’s a custom build version although I’ve tried doom emacs and sp...
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I love Elixir. It’s one of 2 programming languages I’ve ever fallen in love with.
But I don’t use it anymore.
Serverless was the promis...
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Lately I’ve been thinking about how to organize components as a LiveView application grows. One of the pain points I’ve found (for myself...
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What IDE or editor are you using for Elixir development?
Personally, I use Zed, and I really like it, but sometimes I wish there were a ...
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Edit: 2026 May 15 - This post is archived.
Mob is alive!!
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Hey. Is there anyone here who creates agents in their apps? Not talking about using agents, but creating them. I’m finding it pretty diff...
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AstonJ
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

Crowdhailer
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
Completely changed the way I think about code…which is kind of a pain when I have to use other languages…
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
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).
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
could be expressed as
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
Not specifically Elixir but BEAM’s preemptive scheduler especially after working a lot with Node is truly mind blowing.
oldpond
I am constantly blown away by how so much is achieved by so little code. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
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