The nitty gritty of getting started:
I finally clicked on the use of & in lambdas.
The syntax always looked foreign to me.
The following are equivalent:
lambda = fn a, b, x -> a + b - c
lambda = &(&1 + &2 - &3)
The book opens with a high level overview of the technologies on which Elixir is built: Erlang and the BEAM.
I’ve always benefitted from being familiar with the level below where I was programming. In Python, I’d look at the AST and bytecode; in Pascal, the p-code; in C, the assembly code, and in assembly code I had hardware emulators (and Soft-ICE back in the day).
One focus is a review of how you can use the Elixir/Erlang/BEAM environment to create self-contained server-side systems that include web server, background jobs, caches, crash recovery, etc.
Spent the week reading through Saša Jurić’s six-part Understanding macros on The Erlangelist.
I’ve previously managed to wend my way through a macro in one of the Programming Elixir exercises but didn’t really get a handle on it.
Saša’s explanation of quote and unquote was clear and understandable.
That’s the question Francesco Cesarini, founder of Erlang Solutions has asked of dozens of language inventors. He said that José Valim was the first person whose reply included a “focus…on the adoption of ides, semantics, and runtime of another extremely powerful language, Erlang.”
[Read More]Wow, almost a year since my last post.
I learned three things from my first attempt to learn Elixir.
Cool language!
Cool community!
Old brain can no longer jump between a major Python project and a new language.
But there’s no longer any need to jump!
[Read More]Decided to switch from (A)Mnesia to Ecto with SQLite3 for my NVD (CVE) caching application.
Useful and interesting links:
[Read More]Implemented a stream directly from the source CSV file into the Mnesia data store.
Was surprised to see that the Mnesia-stored data is smaller than the original CSV data:
Importing a .csv file using NimbleCSV
An article by Jacob Swanner NimbleCSV: Parsing into Elixir Maps filled in some gaps in the official documentation.
[Read More]I tossed together some Python scripts that download and massage the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure (CVE) data from the NIST/NVD website.
[Read More]Built a simple playground consisting of: