Why I Love Elixir As A Long Time Python User

Discord uses Python for it's API and ELixir for realtime chat capabilities. Functional programming languages are off-putting for everyday uses but Elixir is just beautiful. Here's some musings.

> rem(4, 3)
1

It's very neat to depart from modulo. You want the remainder? Use rem!

The comparison rule is also clearly spelt. Amazing!

number < atom < reference < function < port < pid < tuple < map < list < bitstring

String formatting without weird f letters are welcome!

"Hello #{world_var}"

But concatenation using <> is weird though

["a"] ++ ["b"] sure gives a Python feel ["a"] + ["b"]

Map is convoluted though dict = %{:x => "a", "y" => :z} but access feels at home: dict["hello"]

The iterables could be clearer, the end statement just bugs me: Enum.any?(["a", "aa", "aaa"], fn(s) -> String.length(s) == 3 end)

The . is annoying in fn calls sum.(2, 3)

The pipe operator is really coool!

fucntion() |> decorator()

Documenting feels a lot like docstrings

defmodule Hello do
  ...
  @doc """

  """

For comprehensions, i prefer the in keyword anytime

for x <- list, do: x+2

Filtering is sort of neat

for x <- 1..100,
is_even(x),
rem(x, 3) == 0, do: x i guess in Python we can do [x for x in range(1, 100) if combined_conditions(x)]

Using <<int>> to represent bytes is very interesting to have natively

The raise use is also very pythonic raise ArgumentError, message: "the argument value is invalid"

Concurreny is also weirdly simple:

defmodule Example do
  def listen do
    receive do
      {:ok, "hello"} -> IO.puts("World")
    end

    listen()
  end
end

pid = spawn(Example, :listen, [])
#PID<0.108.0>

It's also far more friendly than Erlang and more readable than Haskell!