Charlie Harvey

Seven More Languages: Elixir Day Three (back on the wagon)

Oh dear. After telling myself I wouldn’t I somehow managed to lunch out my Seven Languages in Seven Weeks oddyssey for 6 months. I had been most of the way through the Elixir section and then got distracted by a shiny object or something.

Well, today I am back on the wagon and the way I am going to play it is to wrap up Elixir quite quickly and move on to Julia. I will certanly come back to Elixir in the future. I like its combination of Scheme-like simplicity, Ruby-like syntactic beauty and Erlang concurrency. But the intervening 6 months have made me lose my train of thought somewhat.

FWIW I had made a start at the exercises back in April, so I have tidied them up and pushed them to github now. I had not however attempted the hard exercise. I think I will leave that for another day too.

Exercises

Easy Exercises

How can you crash your server? What happens if you crash it with and without a supervisor?

Second question first. With a supervisor, my server ought to get restarted after a crash. Unless the crash is a really exciting one — caused by an overheating CPU or something like that!

On how I might cause a crash, apart from inducing hardware failures, the most likely problem at a software level is discussed in the text — passing data that the server doesn’t understand. For example calling an unknown function will do it.

Add a timeout to the pitcher or catcher? What happens when you time out?

Here is what I had written.

def glove do receive do {:pitch, pitcher} -> send pitcher, {:catch, self()} after 2000 -> IO.puts "Oh crap. Went to sleep." end end

Medium Exercises

Write tests for the OTP database

You can find my tests in the tests folder on github. What I will say is that mix makes the whole process of writing tests relatively painless. It works very nicely and is great to have as such a core part of the language.

Hard Exercises

Not attempted


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