Software Craftsmanship: January 2017 Meeting

Sean Culver, Principal at Zeal, delivered an erudite presentation on Elixr for the January meeting of Software Craftsmanship. About 15 serious coders were present.

Software Craftsmen. Copyright © 2017, FPP, Inc. All rights reserved.

After demonstrating how to launch Elixr’s Interactive Mode, and presenting the basic syntax and operators (some of which are similar to those found in Ruby), Sean branched-out and discussed language-specific features like collections and enumerating methods, and how & when to employ them.

Screen. Copyright © 2017, FPP, Inc. All rights reserved.

Collections include:

Lists: immutable
Tuples: stored contiguously in memory; feature because you don’t have to access linked values; commonly used as a mechanism for return values.
Key Word Lists: list of Tuples; similar to a hash in Ruby; keys are not unique; a list of keywords can be used as a method to pass options.
Maps: a lot like hashes; elements don’t have to be all atoms (identifier that is prefixed with a colon); does not maintain order like Keyword Lists; can’t have duplicate keys.
Structs: named Maps

The best part of Sean’s gradual, step-by-step presentation were the clear, simple (and, sometimes, tricky) examples he provided; these sample usages engaged the audience, most of whom were following along on their personal computers. The group participated in the workshop by checking each other’s veracity, and all of us gradually learned the basics about this exciting new language that is designed for building distributed, fault-tolerant applications.

Group views screen. Copyright © 2017, FPP, Inc. All rights reserved.

Zeal continues to be a welcoming place where techies congregate to have a casual (pizza) dinner and hear members of the group present a topic of interest to all. Join us each Last Tuesday of The Month at Zeal World Headquarters!

Upcoming: Trever Yarrish, another Principal at Zeal, will be conducting a class for the SOU Outreach on the topic of Powerful Visual Communication on Wednesday, May 3, 2017 from 8:30 – 11:30 a.m. at the SOU Higher Education Center. Registration Deadline is 9:00 a.m. on Monday, May 2, 2017.