- As someone new to the technology, would this be easy for you to understand?
- Is there a way to make this example more idiomatic to Elixir, without increasing the complexity too much?
Hopefully this isn’t too ranty, but I wanted to share my thoughts. Two things:
- 3 functions aren’t necessarily more complicated than 1. I wouldn’t worry about this.
- Using language or framework specific grammar/syntax isn’t more complex* than keeping things “familiar”.
With the availability of LLMs, the second point is especially true. The more you can leverage well-documented and widely known grammar/syntax, the more clear it will be. Regardless of whether the reader has been exposed them a priori. This is especially true in the age of AI, where a cogent explanation is only a chat prompt away. I understand the apprehension that “the reader may not know Elixir,” but these language features are designed to be intuitive and I think the industry has a tendency to over-estimate on how difficult it will be for someone to understand, for example, the pipe operator.
Edit: Also fwiw I showed your execute_v2 code to an intern with no Elixir experience and they said it was easy to read and they were able to describe what it does with good accuracy. I know this is a single data point, but my point here is that the average dev is pretty good at guessing what well-design syntax does.