elixir on Azrea Amis

Pipeline Operators

Sat, 03 Nov 2018 19:28:01 -0700

Pipeline “operators” or “threading”1 constructs are interesting language constructs. They are an acknowledgement that functional code can be a little obtuse. They reorient (or rewrite) functional code so it looks more like a “dataflow”. Particularly of Lisps, but also of some other functional languages, execution moves from the inside of expressions to the outside in a way that’s not particularly natural feeling. It’s a real source of the difficulty people express when reading functional code.

Flows the Wrong Way, Part 2: The Right Way

Sat, 13 Oct 2018 12:36:21 -0700

Note in 2022: I’m in a very different state of mind compared to when I wrote this, and neither part represents my modern voice or style particularly well. I think it’s still a good story.

In my last post, I covered my first attempt to implement TCP streaming in Flow, a data flow library for Elixir. My first attempts involved a bunch of failed Unix sockets, and an attempt to implement a GenStage that failed for reasons I didn’t understand. I eventually settled on this:

Flows the Wrong Way: Streaming into Elixir

Wed, 10 Oct 2018 15:41:01 -0700

Note in 2022: I’m in a very different state of mind compared to when I wrote this, and neither part represents my modern voice or style particularly well. I think it’s still a good story. As part of a new and exciting project, I was faced with the task of ingesting a large amount of more or less homogeneous JSON data into a SQL database for an associate of mine to do some rudimentary business intelligence analysis on it.