Before adventuring into the land of Elixir, I used Javascript day in and day out for both front-end and back-end development. Javascript’s (lack of) standard libraries forced me to rely heavily on third-party tools and libraries such as Underscore and Lodash.

I became very proficient at working with these tools, and after initially starting with Elixir, I felt very clumsy with the new language. I wasn’t able to accomplish the things I could easily and quickly do with Javascript and Lodash.

Over the past few months, I’ve become much more comfortable with the language, and I’ve realized that Elixir’s standard library outclasses Lodash in nearly every way.

Let’s dig into the two and see how we would translate the Lodash-isms we know and love into Elixir code.

The Usual Suspects

For many functions in Lodash, there’s an obvious mapping to an equivalent function in Elixir’s standard library.

For example, the usual suspects like _.map, _.reduce, _.find, and _.filter all have equivalent functions in Elixir’s Enum module:

_.map([1, 2, 3], n => n + 1)  // Enum.map([1, 2, 3], &(&1 + 1))

_.reduce([1, 2, 3], (s, n) => s + n)  // Enum.reduce([1, 2, 3], &(&2 + &1))

_.includes([1, 2, 3], 2)  // Enum.member?([1, 2, 3], 2)

_.filter([1, 2, 3], n => n < 3)  // Enum.filter([1, 2, 3], &(&1 < 3))

Other commonly used Lodash functions such as _.uniq (Enum.uniq), _.find (Enum.find), _.keyBy (Enum.group_by), etc. also have their counterparts in the Elixir standard library.

Getting Nested Values

I’ve also come to heavily rely on Lodash’s _.get and _.set functions to grab and update values in deeply nested data structures.

Using _.get lets me grab a nested value (or undefined) even if the intermediary objects and arrays don’t exist. For example, instead of writing:

if (foo && foo.bar && foo.bar.baz) {
  return foo.bar.baz.bot;
}

I can simply write:

return _.get(foo, "bar.baz.bot");

When I first started working with Elixir, I really missed being able to do this. Working with complex, nested data structures felt so clunky! That was before I found out about the awesome power of Elixir’s Access behavior and the family of functions built around it.

In Elixir, we can use the get_in function to grab values (or nil) out of nested structures, even if the intermediary values don’t exist:

get_in(foo, [:bar, :baz, :bot])

We can even pass in dynamic lookup fields, which would have required string manipulation in the Javascript example:

get_in(foo, [:bar, some_id, :baz])

Additionally, we can use Accessor functions to take our Elixir-foo to the next level. For example, we could grab the second user’s name (if it exists, otherwise we get nil):

get_in(..., [:users, Access.at(1), :name])

Or we could grab all of the users’ names:

get_in(..., [:users, Access.all(), :name])

If we wanted any of these values or intermediary values to have a default value, we could use Access.key:

get_in(..., [:users, Access.all(), Access.key(:name, "Anonymous")])

Let’s see Lodash’s _.get do that!

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Setting Nested Values

All of these ideas apply to updating values as well. We can use put_in to directly set a value in a nested data structure, or update_in to update it with a function we provide.

For example, we can set values deep in a data structure, even if the intermediary values don’t exist, with put_in and Access.key:

put_in(%{}, [Access.key(:foo, %{}), :bar], "baz")

Similarly, we can update values with update_in or get_and_update_in.

If the Accessors provided by Elixir’s Access module aren’t enough for your use case, you can even write your own custom accessor functions!

Out of the Box Chaining

Elixir’s proverbial cherry on top is undoubtedly its built-in pipe operator.

To pipe Lodash function calls together, you need to explicitly construct a function chain with _.chain, passing in your initial value, and then call _.value at the end of your chain to retrieve the resulting value.

For example, let’s say we want to count the number of orders a set of users has made:

_.chain(users)
 .map("orders")
 .map(orders => orders.length)
 .sum()
 .value();

Because of Elixir’s stateless, functional nature, the barrier of entry for starting a chain is nonexistent:

users
|> Enum.map(&(&1.orders))
|> Enum.map(&length/1)
|> Enum.sum

Final Thoughts

I’ve yet to find a problem easily solvable with Lodash that isn’t easily solvable with an out-of-the-box tool provided by Elixir. In my experience, Elixir has proven to be incredibly more flexible and more powerful than Lodash.

While I originally felt uncomfortable and clumsy working with data in Elixir, my ever growing understanding of the tools the language provides is helping me regain my confidence.

If you haven’t already checked out Elixir, do it!

If you’re new to Elixir and feeling like a fish out of water, my only advice is to stick with it and read through the guides and documentation. You’ll be swimming again in no time.