Before I forget, one of the early things I’ve spent some time wrapping my head around is pattern matching. In a future installment, I plan to share what helped me look at pattern matching from an FP/Elixir perspective instead of an OOP or assignment-focused perspective.

Urban Müller’s programming language is an adjective I might associate with this process

Loving the dedication Charles! Reminds me of when I learnt Ruby

This also reminds me of something!

When I was reading @pragdave’s book Programming Elixir (Pragprog) I tweeted saying I was reading his book and that it was stretching the ol grey matter “..and I like it!”. Anyway I thought it was a dumb tweet and thought Dave probably get’s enough people @mentioning him so I pretty much immediately deleted it. Next thing I know Dave has taken a screengrab of it and tweeted it!

I’m pretty sure that was when I got to pattern matching, so it will definitely feel a little mind bending! Just persevere and I’m sure you’ll be fine

It’s different, that’s for sure! I’m feeling more comfortable with it today, and I think a couple of keys came from one of Dave’s course sections. In it, he specifies a couple of key things:

1. The left-hand side (LHS) is the pattern, not just a variable
2. For a pattern to match, the shape of the two sides must be the same, and literal values in the pattern have to match the corresponding values in the right-hand side (RHS).

Using a list’s head and tail in the LHS of a pattern can sometimes look weird when it appears there are more things in the RHS, but the more patterns I see and play around with, the more natural it’s starting to feel. You’re 100% right about persevering – it just takes some time and patience!

Completely separately, I just vibe coded a Phoenix app to help me master all of the Enum module functions. Here’s a quick screenshot that I think is pretty straightforward:

enum1200×741 40.7 KB

My goal with this is to get random exposure to different Enum functions and get hands-on experience writing them. My process is to read the documentation, search GitHub for some real-world implementations, and then go back and write and run the code.

Eventually, I’d like to add all of the different Elixir modules and their corresponding functions, but at this point in my learning journey it appears (at least according to Dave) that Enum is pretty essential for progressing further.

The code for this is in a local git repo, but I’ll try to make some time to push it upstream later today. I want to play around with some more functions, close/reopen my browser, and make sure things like persistence work before pushing it upstream. (Edit: I just noticed the “functions learned” tracker did not update after completing Enum.min_max/2, so this is an example of something i’d want to fix first. The docs formatting in the left panel is also very ugly.)

I’m also happy to share it as an open source project, but to anyone who reads this and checks out the repo when it’s available, please keep in mind that I’m not focused on Phoenix development quite yet, so I have not even looked at the code.

Once I start learning Phoenix I would be delighted for people to roast my code but since it’s not my focus right now I just don’t think I’d get much benefit from it. Happy to have my mind changed though!

Dude! I started learning Ruby (before Rails, for the same reasons) at around the exact same time you published this article. At the time, I read every single one of those books (including the ones you mention at the end – lots of love for the Pickaxe book ), and I wish I could remember if I read your post! (Feels like I must have.)

I really appreciate your foundational approach to learning frameworks because it resonates with the way I was trained and how I like learn in general. As you recognized, I’m taking a similar approach with Elixir/OTP. While I’m eager to start building with Phoenix (and maybe Ash), I believe the more I learn about the foundational stuff (including the BEAM), the more fun I’ll have building cool stuff soon afterwards.

Thank you for sharing your blog post – it was very well written and a nice trip down Memory Lane!

Here’s the repo for the Elixir Tutor Enum tool. It’s mostly functional and was super fun to put together over the course of my lunch hour today. I’ve had a good time learning about new-to-me Enum functions and writing code.

If anyone wants to play around with this, please see the top of the README.md first.

I can’t make any guarantees as to the fitness of this vibe-coded app. It’s probably pretty terrible for most people. For example, if you make any progress and then close your browser, you will lose all progress. I plan to fix this soon-ish for myself by adding some auth, but I don’t want to make any promises about when. So please be careful until then. Or fork it and do your own thing with it!

Another thing: I don’t want to derail my learning journal by focusing too much on vibe coding because my focus here is really all about mastering the fundamentals. This was just a fun lunch hour project that is helping expose me to some basic Elixir functionality.