Round 1 Day 1

TIL

Currently, during the 100DaysOfCode Challenge, I'm learning elixir. I'll be documenting everything I learn or build as I go. I'm starting off with learning the elixir basics at ElixirSchool.

Basics

• Everything is truthy except for false and nil
• Booleans are atoms (:true, :false)
• Modules are atoms
• You can access erlang libraries using atoms
• Aka atoms are important :)
• Strings use double quotes
• No modulo operator, but there are the div and rem functions.
• Each basic type has a rank :/
  • number < atom < reference < function < port < pid < tuple < map < list < bistring
  • I'll never memorize this lawl
• String interpolation "hello #{world}" or "hello " <> "world" ... Pretty Basic.

Collections

• Lists
  • Mixed types
  • Not unique
  • Linked List → faster to prepend than append > In computer science, a linked list is a linear collection of data elements whose order is not given by their physical placement in memory. Instead, each element points to the next. It is a data structure consisting of a collection of nodes that together represent a sequence.
  • List concat ++/2 - cool
  • List sub --/2 - cool cool
  • Head/Tail - cool cool cool
  • By pattern matching [head | tail] = list #=> head is the first element. the tail will be all the others
  • hd list #=> returns the first element
  • tl list #=> returns all elements after the first
• Tuples
  • Stored with a set amount of memory
  • Access = fast; modification = slow
  • Common for return info from function
• Keyword lists
  • commonly used to pass options to functions
• Maps
  • The Go-to key-value store
  • Similar to ruby's hash
  • Updating syntax is cool?
  • useMap.put/3 to create a new key

Enum

• Not much to go over here if you are familiar with any other languages Enum methods

Pattern Matching

• The Holy Grail of Elixir
• If you ask any dev what they love about elixir chances are they will mention pattern matching
• Curveball = is actually a match operator similar to the equals sign in algebra :exploding-head:
• [1| tail] = list #=> tail has not been matched so it binds to the last elements of the list

Control Structures

• if and unless => straight forward
• case/2
  • Similar to switch(in javascript) or case (ruby) except it uses pattern matching
  • _ is a catch all like default in JavaScript
• Cond
  • Used for matching multiple cases similar to an else if
• With
  • This one is bit trickier coming from other languages
  • Can be used to replace multiple case statements