Programming Elixir

Programming Should Be About Transforming Data

If you come from an object-oriented world, then you are used to thinking in terms of classes and their instances. A class defines behavior, and objects hold state. Developers spend time coming up with intricate hierarchies of classes that try to model their problem, much as Victorian gentleman scientists created taxonomies of butterflies.

When we code with objects, we’re thinking about state. Much of our time is spent calling methods in objects and passing them other objects. Based on these calls, objects update their own state, and possibly the state of other objects. In this world, the class is king—it defines what each instance can do, and it implicitly controls the state of the data its instances ...