It seems since Elixir is purely functional you don't mutate things. So basically you use tail call optimised recursion for everything. Neat.

Recursion lol.

Erlang does it too.

If you want to have state you do recursion and call itself with the updated value.

fn me(iter) -> me(iter+1) end

It's not OO per say, but it is an imperative concept, OO is almost always imperative.