The first thing to note is Elixir's concept of immutability. This means that any variables used will retain their value whenever they're passed along. This is a big difference from languages such as Ruby, where the state of any data you pass on is no longer guaranteed to retain its original value. Objects are a good example of this in Ruby.
To demonstrate this concept a little bit better (don't worry about the syntax yet; we'll get to that!), let's take a look at a code snippet in Javascript, as follows:
function upcase_name(p) { p.name = p.name.toUpperCase();}var person = { name: "Brandon" } // Name here is still 'Brandon'person // Output is { name: "Brandon" }upcase_name(person)person // Oh no! Output is now { name: ...
