Elixir Enum vs Erlang Lists

Question

Is there a reason to use enum library over erlang lists when writing code in Elixir? lists has many of the same functions, like takewhile, partition, any, all...

also elixir-lang.org states "Elixir provides excellent interoperability with Erlang libraries. In fact, Elixir discourages simply wrapping Erlang libraries in favor of directly interfacing with Erlang code."

Is it because the condition function needs to be formated differently that Enum is used over Lists?

Elixir is simply elegant syntactic sugar for writing Erlang code. If you need to a lot of vanilla Erlang then Elixir may be a distraction for you. That said the 'extensions' of List manipulation provided by Elixir's Stream and Flow are a real benefit wrt to vanilla Erlang. — GavinBrelstaff

Théophile Choutri Théophile Choutri · Accepted Answer · 2018-03-05T16:24:01

So, Enum is a module that holds functions that work with data structures implementing the Enumerable protocol.

Lists in Erlang/Elixir are Linked Lists, which have several properties in terms of algorithmic complexity when it comes to indexing and inserting.

Enumerables in Elixir are data structures such as lists, but also maps and mapsets. However, as stated in the documentation:

the majority of the functions in Enum enumerate the whole enumerable and return a list as result

That being said, two reasons to use Enum functions over List-based functions is that basically:

There are more of them, and will provide you with very useful ways to tackle a problem
They are polymorphic. Change your map for a keyword list any time and don't waste time rewriting everything in your codebase.

Elixir Enum vs Erlang Lists

1 Answers