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Comment by zelphirkalt | Hacker News Reader

I recently used Elixir for Advent of Code 2023. It is elegant in many places, at least from what I have explored during puzzle solving. However, to me it does not reach the elegance of Scheme or Lisp and I switched back to Guile while solving more puzzles. Due to its not as simple syntax, naming choices are more limited than in many Lispy languages. Also the way anonymous functions are written did not appeal to me especially that much and how they must be written when being passed to other function and how to reference functions in the same module sometimes requiring to still write the name of the module and all that is not that intuitive.

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> how to reference functions in the same module sometimes requiring to still write the name of the module

Not sure what you mean here. If the function is in the same module then you should be able to refer to it without including the module name.

Can you give some example code to show what you mean?

I don't know exactly where it happened, but here [1] is a typical AoC code using Elixir. At some point I got so annoyed by Elixir telling me it does not find the functions of the very same module, that I simply defaulted to always writing the module name.

[1]: https://codeberg.org/ZelphirKaltstahl/advent-of-code-2023/sr...

Edit: Ah yes, I remember it happening in |> pipes a lot.

I still don't get it. I downloaded your code and stripped `Part01.` from all the function calls and it worked fine with no warnings. What's the problem?

By the way, these two lines are redundant:

    alias FileHandling, as: FileHandling
    alias ListUtils

The first line is redundant because `alias X, as: Y` makes module X available with the name Y - so if X and Y are the same then it doesn't achieve anything. And the second line is redundant because `alias X.Y.Z` with no `as` makes module `X.Y.Z` available with the abbreviated name `Z`. But if the original module name contains no dots then then there's nothing to abbreviate.

Not a function but when a module has a struct that you want to use inside the module you need to use the full module name or alias itself.

You can write __MODULE__ to reference the current module. Or if the current module is a struct you can write %__MODULE__{}

That's not very pretty though ;)

IIRC you can also write:

alias __MODULE__

Do you have a repo for your Guile solutions to AoC? Would love to see it.

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