[erlang-questions] Design patterns?

[Judson Lester]

As I'm becoming more comfortable and proficient in Erlang, I'm finding
there there are interesting patterns that begin to emerge that I'm not sure
I've seen elsewhere. I'm wondering if there's a collection somewhere, maybe
c2 style?

One example is a complicated data processing: I've started creating a
special purpose record and dispatching based on its fields. That includes
short-circuiting on errors, constructing syntheses from simpler data, etc.
Since I've stumbled onto it, I've been really liking how it can bring the
full force of pattern matching to complex processing. I do worry that it's
a bit of a smell though. If the processing can be simplified, that might be
better, but it's better, imo, than a long ladder of
maybe_compute_other_thing style functions.

And an open question (for me): when to use case/if versus function heads?
Roughly, I've been using cases to reformat the returns of a function call,
but the decision trips me up every time.

Judson
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