You’ve made great points! I agree that appealing to authority can motivate some people, but critical thinking is key. The saying “Learn all the rules so you can break them” really captures how mastery leads to innovation.
As for Enum.at and similar patterns, context is everything—they aren’t bad inherently, but often overused. And I completely agree about maintainers: respectful, informed critiques lead to the best discussions.
Why do you need to spawn here, instead of function call
https://github.com/ouerghi01/Elixir-99-Functional-Mastery/blob/main/lib/binarytrees.ex#L11
You can execute the logic without spawning processes here, but I want to experiment with concurrency. In this case, one process (thread) executes something, while another waits for it to complete quickly. For example, in the code provided, the is_tree function spawns a new process to check the left subtree and sends the result back. Meanwhile, the main process waits for the result and continues processing the right subtree if necessary.
It is pointless and slow to spawn if you’re just going to block, waiting for immediately. You can use recursion without the extra processes.
I have used Elixir to read data from 4 different data sources and provide processed, summarized information in an output sink. Elixir helped immensely in building this pipeline.
The volume of data was medium (billions of rows)- SQL and files (Erlang External Term Format).
Used Flow to process data concurrently, Explorer to store intermediate information into CSV and then merged/joined/etc and Flow again to send them their merry ways. Ecto for the SQL bits.
Had good use of VegaLite to understand data and tweak concurrency level (didn’t need to but it was fun).
LiveBook was the environment all of them ran. This was my bread and butter for better part of last year.
Sorry for being rather abstract since it’s “work project” but the pattern is generic enough to give y’all ideas on how Elixir can help in solving problems.
And if you want smaller, isolated problems, then there’s always Advent of Code, and if you click on any posts here tagged advent-of-code or variations of it, you will surely find amazing people solving amazing problems and sharing their thought process. I know I was helped by it!
https://github.com/ouerghi01/Elixir-99-Functional-Mastery/pull/1/files
Just addressed a couple to hopefully provide some direction. I kept the is_tree asynchronous but did it in a way that does not block. For the record I would not normally use concurrency in this problem b/c it’s not going to provide much benefit and could potentially spiral out of control for massively deep trees. I did it here just to illustrate using the Task module to make async code more pleasant.