AstonJ

AstonJ

Do you say 'unpack' or 'destructure'?

Consider this Erlang code:

Rectangle = {rectangle, 20, 10}.
{rectangle, Width, Height} = Rectangle.
> Width.
20
> Height.
10

When I was watching an Elixir video the person kept calling this ‘destructuring’ (which I think is what they say in the JS world?) but Joe Armstrong, in his book Programming Erlang, calls this ‘unpacking’ - so I am curious, how do you refer to it when using a BEAM language?

  • Unpack
  • Destructure
  • Use the terms interchangeably depending on the language
  • Something else - please say in thread!

0 voters

Most Liked

chriseyre2000

chriseyre2000

Technically it’s pattern matching since we can be more specific by repeating a variable to ensure that it is used in multiple places.

Eiji

Eiji

Object : typeof instance === "object". Special non-data but Structural type for any constructed object instance also used as data structures: new Object, new Array, new Map, new Set, new WeakMap, new WeakSet, new Date and almost everything made with new keyword;

Source: JavaScript data types and data structures - JavaScript | MDN

This quote shows us that equivalent/similar data types across languages are implemented and therefore grouped differently which means that we can’t use exactly same naming. Different naming forces new developer to think: Why it's named like that? and that ends up with looking for it’s definition.

The destructuring assignment syntax is a JavaScript expression that makes it possible to unpack values from arrays, or properties from objects, into distinct variables.

Source: Destructuring assignment - JavaScript | MDN

Having in mind that both destructure and unpack are used only for arrays and objects it’s confusing to use them in Elixir for other data types like for example string. Destructure naming could also be confusing for newbies as we have structs.

Destructure and unpack antonyms suggest that we have something structured or packed which is not always true. While it’s common to say that we are unpacking bits from string still we can’t say that we are unpacking something from literal like for example: 5 = variable.

Generally i.e. for all data types I prefer to think about some connection of assignment, fetch, pattern and take words (which are most common) like taking by pattern or something like that.

@AstonJ Considering your Erlang code we can say that we are taking items: rectangle, Width and Height by 3-element tuple pattern of Rectangle variable. What do you think about it?

Where Next?

Popular Backend topics Top

AstonJ
Which server-side languages are you most interested in right now? Anything new or relatively new that’s caught your eye? Maybe an older l...
New
wolf4earth
Serverless has been quite a prevalent topic in our industry in the past few years, and while there are a lot of sceptics, I think it’s sa...
New
DevotionGeo
Some time ago I read somewhere that Rocket will work with stable versions of Rust. The previous version’s changelog says, “Core: Removed...
New
First poster: bot
C++: The Good Parts . Jordan DeLong overviews the past, current and near future “good parts” of C++'s functional side through the colore...
New
DevotionGeo
How Dgraph was running out of memory for some users, and how Go’s Garbage collector wasn’t enough, and Dgraph team used jemalloc to manag...
New
New
mafinar
I wrote a blog post! On F#. I usually don’t write things but figured i should try it out, also experimenting with F# and C# lately, love ...
New
DevotionGeo
What do you people do for reading Erlang docs? Is there something like Ruby’s ri? I installed manual pages for Erlang under /usr/local/...
New
jaeyson
Hi all!, anybody tried this Elixir quiz from @Tetiana? She’s the one who made Elixircards.
New
lucasvegi
Hello guys! Perhaps some of you have already seen this invitation on other channels in the Elixir community or even responded to our surv...
New

Other popular topics Top

PragmaticBookshelf
From finance to artificial intelligence, genetic algorithms are a powerful tool with a wide array of applications. But you don't need an ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Tailwind CSS is an exciting new CSS framework that allows you to design your site by composing simple utility classes to create complex e...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Build highly interactive applications without ever leaving Elixir, the way the experts do. Let LiveView take care of performance, scalabi...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Use WebRTC to build web applications that stream media and data in real time directly from one user to another, all in the browser. ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Programming Ruby is the most complete book on Ruby, covering both the language itself and the standard library as well as commonly used t...
New
First poster: bot
zig/http.zig at 7cf2cbb33ef34c1d211135f56d30fe23b6cacd42 · ziglang/zig. General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaini...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Leverage Elixir and the Nx ecosystem to build intelligent applications that solve real-world problems in computer vision, natural languag...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
An illustrated guide to understanding and effectively using regular expressions. Staffan Nöteberg To effectively use regular expressi...
New
mindriot
Ok, well here are some thoughts and opinions on some of the ergonomic keyboards I have, I guess like mini review of each that I use enoug...
New
xiji2646-netizen
There’s a GitHub repo at forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills that’s sitting at 97.8k stars. It’s a single CLAUDE.md file with four behavi...
New