So Advent of Code is back, and this year I thought I’d take the opportunity to stretch my coding legs on a language that makes me uncomfortable: Elixir.
I’ve used Elixir only once, a few years ago, for a tiny Phoenix-based API. The language’s bizarre elegance intrigued me; its lack of common programming features like for and while loops is offset by pattern-matching, pipelines, and immutability. I haven’t written enough Elixir code to become comfortable with these strange new tools, but they’re foreign enough to be interesting—and who knows what unknown unknowns are lurking beyond my horizon?
Anyway, I’m hoping that a month of floundering with Elixir will expand my mental framework of what programming actually means (like Ruby, Clojure, and functional programming did). So, onward to the code:
Really simple, actually (assuming that Elixir is installed on your system):
-
Solving the day’s problem:
elixir day-01.exs -
Running tests:
elixir -r day-01.exs day-01-test.exs
In certain situations, Stream.iterate/2 can be a concise alternative to recursion or reduction, especially combined with Enum.take_while/2.
Destructuring and pattern-matching are powerful. Pipes eliminate the mess of nested function calls. I’m finding myself defining way fewer intermediate variables, which reduces the mental overload of having to name things. Elixir just seems designed to eliminate syntactical clutter.
I guess I’ve used languages with first-class functions before, but never really noticed or took advantage of it. So I can’t believe this actually works!
Functions can be imported from other modules, and then called without their Module prefix. In this regard, but also generally, I’m surprised by how intuitive Elixir’s scoping seems.