I would say yes, for that kind of system of hints, however, I don’t have any suggestion specifically for iEX, but I would like to see the same approach for migrations. I know, its Ecto, but maybe there could be any layer between that translates errors.
krapans
Eiji
Ok, so how new developers known about iex? From official site 
Ok, so here is my proposition:
We should have 2 ways to disable this feature:
- per session like:
iex --no-hints - global - in configuration file
I believe that if someone is going to test API then he will not disable this and otherwise he would get tips in next time.
5
josevalim
Creator of Elixir
From the official site, blog posts, books, screencasts, online courses, university classes, presentations, etc. It is impossible to change all of them to talk about some special flag.
Yes, those two mechanisms should be supported as well as an API to call directly from Elixir, such as IEx.hints(false).
5
josevalim
Creator of Elixir
From that topic, I got rebinding:
iex> x = 1
iex> x = 2
but I am not sure it is something worth having a hint for because I expect most newcomers to actually be ok with rebinding? Emitting a hint and talking about immutability can cause more confusion than help in this case? Thoughts?
2
Eiji
I learned lots of languages and don’t remember any with rebinding/pattern matching. I think that they should be described in one tip, for example:
One of Elixir language features is support pattern matching.
Note; pattern matching is not variable assignment.
iex> x = 1
iex> 1 = x
iex> 2 = x # exception
iex> x = 2
iex> 2 = x
iex> [a, b, %{c: c}] = [1, 2, %{c: 3}]
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Neurofunk
ejc123
crusso
I think that beefing up the help system is a great idea.
However, I would prefer it if the getting of help information were explicitly requestable. By default, iex shouldn’t offer these help messages. I often drop into iex from a random directory (with no configuration) to play around with a bit of elixir - so I don’t want to see a bunch of extra help information that I have to affirmatively disable.
Instead, I would prefer it if iex required you to activate the help system, either as a mode that can be enabled or disabled with a command - or perhaps as a special way to enter a command. For example, preceding the command with a “??” would enable the help for that command:
iex(1)> ?? Enum.map([0, 1, 2], & &1 + 10)
1
wojtekmach
Hex Core Team
I think there should be a hint for the #iex:break trick.
Edit: not sure if it fits into example hints that were shown above, but I think breaking from a borked expression is definitely a big gotcha. If it’s possible to capture ctrl+c and display once this hint, I think it would be useful.
4