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Learning Elixir

Learning Elixir

By : Kenny Ballou, Kenneth Ballou
5 (1)
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Learning Elixir

Learning Elixir

5 (1)
By: Kenny Ballou, Kenneth Ballou

Overview of this book

Elixir, based on Erlang’s virtual machine and ecosystem, makes it easier to achieve scalability, concurrency, fault tolerance, and high availability goals that are pursued by developers using any programming language or programming paradigm. Elixir is a modern programming language that utilizes the benefits offered by Erlang VM without really incorporating the complex syntaxes of Erlang. Learning to program using Elixir will teach many things that are very beneficial to programming as a craft, even if at the end of the day, the programmer isn't using Elixir. This book will teach you concepts and principles important to any complex, scalable, and resilient application. Mostly, applications are historically difficult to reason about, but using the concepts in this book, they will become easy and enjoyable. It will teach you the functional programing ropes, to enable them to create better and more scalable applications, and you will explore how Elixir can help you achieve new programming heights. You will also glean a firm understanding of basics of OTP and the available generic, provided functionality for creating resilient complex systems. Furthermore, you will learn the basics of metaprogramming: modifying and extending Elixir to suite your needs.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
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10
Index

Calling functions


There's another issue I've so far been skirting over—the syntax of calling functions. Specifically, you may have seen some examples around in which calling a function does not use parentheses to denote the function call. For example, from our previous example, these are equivalent:

iex(3)> MyMath.square(4)
16
iex(4)> MyMath.square 4
16

Why, you ask, is this the case? Why do we have two different acceptable forms? Elixir has a lot of its roots in Erlang. But this is only, so far, as some basic syntax and the runtime. The syntax borrows fairly heavily from Ruby. Thus, there's some Ruby syntactical elements present throughout Elixir, and this happens to be one of the Ruby carry-overs.

As far as when to use one version of the syntax over another is concerned, it depends. I would argue it's mostly a preference of style. If you like to read functions with less braces running around, don't use parentheses to invoke functions. Or, you may like the explicit use as they denote...

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