The Little Schemer Exercises in Elixir

https://github.com/jwhiteman/a-little-elixir-goes-a-long-way

by dpeck • 11 years ago

97 23 11 years ago

rozap• 11 years ago

Reading through this it becomes very apparent very quickly how concise, expressive, and elegant elixir is. The elixir versions seem to be on average 2/3 of the length of scheme, which is already fairly terse.

These exercises are great for anyone curious about the language. While I drank the elixir koolaid a while ago, it continues to be a really pleasant language to write stuff in.

davexunit• 11 years ago

Note that modern Scheme implementations have pattern matchers that eliminate much of the car/cdr'ing done in the Little Schemer, making it much shorter.

alvatar• 11 years ago

Yes, or just use match.scm which provides this functionality as well.

The point of Scheme is not the features it has, but how it allows you to build the features yourself. Try doing logic programming in Elixir, probably it won't work that well (just probably, I don't know Elixir).

juliangamble• 11 years ago

There is a whole bunch of implementations of The Little Schemer (and other great Lisp books) in Clojure here: http://juliangamble.com/blog/2012/07/13/amazing-lisp-books-l...

r0naa• 11 years ago

I am completely unfamiliar with Elixir but I love the aesthetics of the language. That's a really neat piece of work, thank you for sharing.

I often wonder what are some good usecases for Elixir? What kind of problem do you solve using Elixir?

adrusi• 11 years ago

It runs on BEAM, the erlang vm, and has essentially the same usecases as erlang. Good for distributed systems, including web applications, bad for cpu bound tasks, for systems programming. Not great for scripting but usable if you want.

rubiquity2• 11 years ago

bad for cpu bound tasks

Just to elaborate on this: Elixir is slower at CPU work than C/C++/Java but still significantly faster than Ruby/Python/etc. not to mention a lot easier to do work in parallel due to SMP and the BEAM's concurrency model.

pselbert• 11 years ago

The .exs extension and mix integration makes elixir better than one might expect for scripting. It doesn't get to ruby or perl territory, but definitely good enough for scripting to keep code homogeneous in a project.

chx• 11 years ago

http://lebo.io/2015/06/22/the-unix-philosophy-and-elixir-as-...

angersock• 11 years ago

From a numerics standpoint, both Elixir and Erlang have some issues. One of the annoying ones is that there isn't the concept of NaNs like you'd expect--it will actually throw an error if you divide by zero. For certain applications, this is annoying.

Further, there isn't really any hope (right now) of accessing hardware SIMD due to the way that the Erlang VM handles its numbers. Lists are cons-cell lists, tuples are arrays of bundled atoms, and neither will give you numbers in adjacent memory slots.

I toyed with the idea of using bitstrings and storing "raw" vectors in NIFs, but it feels so clunky to do that and then have to marshal into and out of native code all the time.

All of that said, it's downright pretty how you can write some of your tests.

Source: I've written a vector math library for Elixir.

scardine• 11 years ago

Last week I picked up Fabio Mascarenhas (of Lua fame) at the airport for an event. I was surprised when he told me that like Lua, elixir also has Brazilian roots. Few Brazilians know that.

ffn• 11 years ago

Speaking of this, just how did Elixir's Jose Valim (who I assume is Polish) wind up working at the Brazilian Plataformatec? Last I checked, Brazil is a quite a bit more than a stone's throw away from Poland, and I would imagine even the tele-commute must be hell much less the physical commute.

nelmaven• 11 years ago

You assume wrong, José Valim is Brazilian.

The Little Schemer Exercises in Elixir

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