Hacker News Reader

Often times when writing a macro or a function that should appear as though it's a part of a DSL, the advantage of turning off parenthesis can shine here. That's why parenthesis are optional with a lot of the Ecto macros.

View on HN

Optional parentheses are pretty much a requirement considering how much of Elixir is actually 'just' macros. I'm very happy that the formatter adds them for me as much as possible though, because I'm also not a fan of how far Ruby takes it.

Agreed. I used to remove parenthesis as often as possible. Looking back at the code, that may not have been the brightest idea.

I really do like the coding convention though that lack of parenthesis can indicate a function meant to be a part of a DSL.

I agree. As an additional point, when you have auto-formatting on save, this can also enrich your insight about the DSL at hand. It has for me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com