Elixir Diary Day 1: Playing with IEx

Documenting my journey in Elixir world.

Day 1 - Elixir Data structures

I like functionnal programming and I was pursuing some interest in Clojure, but seems like I’m doomed to have no friends 😞, people hate the (()(())) so much, as much as I tried, the experience of a beginner is fairly unfriendly. Tbh I don’t think it’s that big a deal.

In 2018, I missed the opportunity to contribute to an Elixir code because I wanted to excel in front-end, I guess it’s always time to catch up.

Okay, so on first day of school, I’m going through some chapters of this https://elixirschool.com/en/lessons/basics/collections

If I find Elixir very compelling, like everybody seems to say so .🐑🐑🐑. I’ll probably going to get a copy of a book and read it cover to cover.

I’ve mostly spent most of my career programming in JavaScript/Typescript. It’s pretty pleasant to do some basic programming operations without thinking about the quirks of the language. ie: comparing two maps/objects

Of course, starting a new task by bikeshedding around setting up emacs, because why not.

I was looking for a REPL dev experience close to what Clojure offer: being able to send lines of code to a REPL and evaluate it. I found this

inf-elixir

J3RN • Updated Aug 5, 2023

Going through data structures

Random thoughts:

Wow i can just deep compare map to another map and it works ? 🤯 exploding in JS.


iex(63)> %{:foo => "bar"} == %{:foo => "bar"}
true
iex(64)>  %{:foo => "bar", :baz => %{:lol => "mdr"}} == %{:foo => "bar", :baz => %{:lol => "mdr"}}
true
iex(65)>  %{:foo => "bar", :baz => %{:lol => "mdr"}} == %{:foo => "bar", :baz => %{:lol => "xd"}}
false

Syntax does not matter, semantic does.
There’s many ways to express collections:

Keywords list
Maps
List
Tuple

Variables are not immutable ?


iex(60)> name = "George"
"George"
iex(61)> name = "Georgia"
"Georgia"
iex(62)> name 
"Georgia"

I would have expected an error trying to overriding a “variable”.

You can use array as a key in a map ? 😮
I’m curious how much built-in methods there are in Elixir compared to a language like Clojure