Thoas - Elixir's Jason JSON library converted to Erlang

[OvermindDL1]

@max-au

Using tuples makes code less readable, and pushes developers towards bubble-wrapping. Example:

Erlang may be getting a solution to this via EEP 49, that would become:

do_steps(Arg) ->
    maybe
        {ok, Success} ?= step1(Arg),
        {ok, Success2} ?= step2(Success),
        {ok, Success3} ?= step3(Success2),
        {ok, Success3}
    end.

@max-au

What the developer actually means is:

That has a different return value, and the errors aren’t exceptional, json errors are very common and part of code flow, shouldn’t be hidden.

@max-au

In most cases “no throw return code” still has to be somehow checked for an error. Often this way:

And that way will indeed throw if it is not a success, which gives you your throwing transparently while handling errors if you wish as well.

@seriyps

Guess that’s the reason why Eep 0049 - Erlang/OTP was introduced.

Yep this thing!

@lpil

Thoas will not default to throwing I’m afraid. I feel strongly that APIs that throw are surprising and error prone, and there’s currently no Erlang static analysis tooling that can assist you in using or refactoring code that throws. Returning values on the other hand is explicit and immediately clear to the user.

+1

@lpil

Cloning the API of another existing library isn’t a goal so I’m not willing to make what I see as a detrimental change to it in order to meet this non-goal.

It’s trivial enough to make a wrapper module that follows other library API’s but exposes your as well.

@lpil

Easily solved with sed -i s/jiffy:/thoas_throwing:/, though given all the libraries above accept different options and have slightly different formats for decoded JSON I don’t think the idea of a standardised API is as true as we’re making it out to be here.

+1