I have been reading “Polished Ruby Programming” by Jeremy Evans and am really enjoying it. He has one chapter, chapter 9, on Metaprogramming, and another, chapter 10, on DSLs. His examples are quite accessible, like for example he starts by creating a class where, when you call it with a missing m…

The best two resources I know (besides just diving into someone else’s codebase): The Erlangelist - Understanding macros, part 1 Metaprogramming Elixir: Write Less Code, Get More Done (and Have Fun!) by Chris McCord

To add to the above, official guides on macros are decent for getting going. Quote and unquote — Elixir v1.20.2 See the very end of the side bar for the next two chapters. You can also just google stuff, in my experience it’s quite accessible and sometimes can…

Addendum: Read the book before the Erlangelist posts. The former is a very gentle introduction and will show you many tecniques (for your examples). The latter goes deep really fast (but goes to (dark) places the book nevers goes) :slight_smile: But yeah, those two are indeed all you need

the book is 8 years old, is it still valid?

The Metaprogramming Elixir very much, I always tend to return to it when I forget how to do some shenanigans in my macros.

I’m not sure what you mean by valid. If you mean completely up to date with any new things they added since then, then no. If you want to know the fundamentals then yes.

[image] joey_the_snake: any new things they added since then Off the top of my head I can’t really think of anything that has been added on the macro front honestly.

I could see books that predate Code.quoted_to_algebra having to spend a lot of effort making AST → code transformations, but that’s more “macro-adjacent” than macro-related.

Metaprogramming in Elixir is more than macros. Arguably the non-macro parts are more accessible, easier to understand and less potentially obfuscating so I typically recommend starting there. And yes, Chris’s book is great (first Elixir book I bought way back when). Its also a testament to José’s o…

Are there accessible metaprogramming examples?

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joey_the_snake April 29, 2023, 9:46pm 2

The best two resources I know (besides just diving into someone else’s codebase):

The Erlangelist - Understanding macros, part 1
Metaprogramming Elixir: Write Less Code, Get More Done (and Have Fun!) by Chris McCord