chattbot's Introduction

Chattbot, Week 1

This is a several-week curriculum for teaching Elixir to new students. This is week 1. Subsequent weeks will be added as branches.

Goals for Week 1:

Learn that Elixir code is primarily modules with functions inside
Those functions can be tested with software tests.

Vocabulary

Sometimes, it helps working through a couple of concepts in the console before you start. This is espeically true of new programmers. Here are the functions we need:

Pipes.

A pipe expression makes an expression from a piece of data, a pipe operator, and a function.
The data becomes the first argument in the function.
Pipes get more interesting as you string them together. They are like factories, transforming one thing into the next.

String functions

String.trim(string) creates a new string without the whitespace at the beginning and end of the string.
String.ends_with?(string, ending) returns true if string ends with ending. The question mark means the function will return a true or false. It's not something Elixir requires. It's something we do make it easier on folks reading this function.
a == b returns true if a and b are the same; false otherwise
a = b is a match. If a is not set, it makes a the same as b.
String.upcase(string) makes a new string with all letters converted to their capital form.
String.downcase(string) creates a new lower case version of string.