It can be slightly confusing because elixir allows rebinding identifiers. Immutability is as a result a bit closer to how strings behave in many popular languages (e.g. C#) where the value a variable name points to can change but the value itself cannot.
Every change to a value results in a new value and to keep track of it you need to bind it to a name, but the name can be reused while the value itself can’t be changed.
If you consider this JavaScript example:
let person = { name: “Bob” };
Then following this in elixir you could do something conceptually similar to:
person = { name: “Nicola” };
But you couldn’t do something conceptually similar to:
person.name = “Nicola”;
However another slight difference in this comparison is in elixir everything is passed by value, nothing is passed by reference so changes to what a name points to only impacts usage of that name going forward and never any previous usage of that name.
