Immutable Data

Get familiar with the benefits of immutability in functional programming languages.

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If we listen to functional programming experts, we’ll hear them make a big deal about immutability, which is the fact that in a functional program, data cannot be altered once created. And, indeed, Elixir enforces immutable data. But why?

Let’s forget about Elixir for a moment and think about our current programming language of choice. Let’s imagine we wrote this:

count = 99
do_something_with(count)
print(count)

We’d expect it to output ...