LearningElixir

Further side-quest to become comfortable with IEx/mix/dbg/pry. Learning commandline debugging since I’ve not been able to figure out how to launch a debuggable commandline program from VSCode.

Setting up a VSCode environment before tackling the Chapter 13 exercises.

A side-foray into tooling after being away for a few days.

Elixir has an unless keyword, which I don’t recall seeing in any other language I’ve used.

“Elixir exceptions are intended for things that should never happen in normal operation”

Trailing ! in a function name is an Elixir convention indicating failure raises an exception. We’ve already seeing this in the File.open! call in previous exercises.

Strings are UTF-8 encoded.

Earlier chapters focused on list processing via recursion. Now we’re getting into the more familiar iterables.

Chapter 8 is a dense chapter on an extremely useful set of features. Will become a reference chapter when starting to build Elixir projects as I’m very used to using maps, structs, etc.

Chapter 9 is a quick aside on types.

Neither chapter has exercises.

Making the best of recursion.

It takes awhile to get used to not seeing function return statements. Drives home the point that everything is an evaluation.

Unlike Python lambda functions, Elixir anonymous functions can be arbitrarily complex (though I guess there is a limit to what is practicable from a maintainability point of view).

In order to exit the interactive Elixir shell (iex), all you need do is type:

• Ctrl-c twice; or
• Ctrl-g, q, <Return>; or sometimes
• Ctrl-\

Missed the opportunity to allow :q.