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Learning Elixir

You're reading from   Learning Elixir Unveil many hidden gems of programming functionally by taking the foundational steps with Elixir

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jan 2016
Publisher
ISBN-13 9781785881749
Length 286 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Languages
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Authors (2):
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Kenneth Ballou Kenneth Ballou
Author Profile Icon Kenneth Ballou
Kenneth Ballou
Kenny Ballou Kenny Ballou
Author Profile Icon Kenny Ballou
Kenny Ballou
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Table of Contents (11) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Introducing Elixir – Thinking Functionally FREE CHAPTER 2. Elixir Basics – Foundational Steps toward Functional Programming 3. Modules and Functions – Creating Functional Building Blocks 4. Collections and Stream Processing 5. Control Flow – Occasionally You Need to Branch 6. Concurrent Programming – Using Processes to Conquer Concurrency 7. OTP – A Poor Name for a Rich Framework 8. Distributed Elixir – Taking Concurrency to the Next Node 9. Metaprogramming – Doing More with Less Index

Summary

In this chapter, we discussed a number of topics concerning Elixir and metaprogramming.

Typespecs are used as a means for documenting code (with code) such that other programmers (and ourselves) will know at a glance the expected types of certain functions. Typespecs are also a great tool for annotating code, functions, and modules for static analysis, and for finding type issues or other bugs typically unavailable to dynamically-typed languages.

Behaviours can be thought of akin to interfaces from OO languages. They are a means to define modules that will have a set of public functions with specific arity. If the modules adopting a behaviour do not define any or all of the functions from the behaviour, Elixir will raise a compiler warning.

Protocols are a means of performing high-level pattern matching and function dispatching for certain actions. For example, translating types into printable strings requires implementation of the String.Chars protocol for the specific type. This...

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