Having fun with functional programming ft.Elixir
08 September 2023 05:10:12
One day of learning elixir provides me a lot of unusual yet fun experience, since the first installation phase. I already failed to install using the windows installer from the official site. So i change it using tool called scoop which is like npm, yeah like another friend sharing the same idea to install packages. so using scoop with powershell (non administrator mode), i successfully installed elixir and erlang to my machine. I continue to learn the functional programming paradigm which is simply in elixir i can summary as 3 concept list:
1.immutabilty ? it's simply you can't mutate the data. what already declared it's fixed and can't be changed.2.Function as first class citizen ? it means function is just like other type value in elixir. you can return function and use function as argument. just like other value. and3.then the last is declarative programming, which is opposite of imperative programming. if imperative programming is the style of telling the program exactly what step to do to solve the problem. then declarative is declarative we look for the problem and descibe what desired result we want without explicitly tell what the steps are.
and then continued to data type, where i found an atom data type which is new to me. If you’re familiar with Ruby, these are synonymous with Symbols. also An important feature of Elixir is that any two types can be compared; this is particularly useful in sorting. We don’t need to memorize the sort order, but it is important to be aware of it:
number < atom < reference < function < port < pid < tuple < map < list < bitstring
the jump to collection, Elixir implements list collections as linked lists. it looks array in js but there you go... also found new concept called pattern matching which is quitely fun. x = 1 ( this pattern matching?), Realizing that = isn’t just for binding variables can be hard if you’re accustomed to variable assignments in other programming paradigms. To help us with this transition, we can use an algebra analogy: if x = 1, then 1 = x is valid.
well i mumbling a lot i guess. that's because it's 5 am and i still not have sleep yet, idk what i am doing lol. conclusion is in elixir every basic building block is a function. These functions follow principles, such as immutability and explicit declaration. that's why they called functional programming language. why function programming? it's because they want it, they need this kind of paradigm which is not mutating any data in state, why again? it's because this language feature is concurently and it's kinda hard to dealing with internal state when they changed a lot, so they make it immutable and then they following the functional languag paradigm.
sorry for the bad writing, i guess next one will be better. next is some practical app that created using elixir so i don't just talk only about the language feature without implementing its usefullness.