I am trying to get back into Elixir after trying it on a while back ago and keep tripping up on the tiniest things. Here’s a list so I’ll remember the next time I do another refresher,
Strings are really a sequence of bytes until they aren’t
I keep fucking this up so it goes on top. In Elixir, 'A bunch of bytes' is not the same as "A bunch of bytes". Single quoting gets you a char list while double quoting returns a string. It’s probably safe to ignore single quotes because char lists are mostly used to interface with Erlang. The worse thing about screwing this up is that it gets you errors that are not very helpful for beginners:
iex> URI.encode "this is a string"
"this%20is%20a%20string"
iex> URI.encode 'not a string'
** (FunctionClauseError) no function clause matching in URI.encode/2
(elixir) lib/uri.ex:273: URI.encode('Sydney', #Function<1.59727112/1 in URI.encode/1>)
Non Objects
Elixir has no objects. Which means that there aren’t dot chains. But they make it up with pipes and having the first parameter of a method from the pipe. Which means that,
String.upcase(Enum.join(["a", "b", "c"], ", "))
is the same as,
["a", "b", "c"] |> Enum.join(", ") |> String.upcase
Functions with no name
These are different enough from Ruby that it needs repeating,
sum = fn (a, b) -> a + b end
# is the same as
sum = &(&1 + &2)
# and are both called with
sum.(2, 3)
a slightly more advanced example,
a = [1, 2, 3]
a |> Enum.map(fn x -> x*x end) # [1, 4, 9]
a |> Enum.map(&(&1 * &1)) # [1, 4, 9]
I’m sticking with fn until I get the hang of things.
Inserts and Updates
There’s a really nifty way to do insert a new item at the head of a list,
results = [1, 2]
[0 | results] # [0, 1, 2]
# does not work the other way!
[results | 0] # [[1, 2] | 0]
There’s a similar thing with Map updates,
map = %{a: 1, b: 2}
%{map | a: 100} # %{a: 100, b: 2}
# however, this doesn't work
%{a: 100 | map} # error!
# and neither does inserts
%{map | c: 100} # error!
That’s it for now. I’m not getting into Pattern Matching because that’s a whole other beautiful beast. If you need to do a refresher, Elixir School is pretty neat.
Thank you Brian Glusman for reviewing drafts of this post.