You are reading an incredible amount of hostility into my comments that is not there.
> Translation: the person asking needs to RTFM because they have a problem with something that is obvious or I don't understand and it doesn't matter which. This isn't being rude.
That’s an incredibly uncharitable translation and doesn’t accurately match my meaning or intent. At each point in this thread, other commenters and I have provided explanations and linked documentation. Each response has been of the form “sure thing / that’s true, but it’s not obvious to me”. Then a repetition of the core complaint. This has led to more attempts at explanation and linking documentation, just to get the same response. Saying RTFM is one thing, but it’s simply not rude to suggest reading docs would bring clarity (and suggesting reading docs would help is not the same as answering “RTFM”).
> Translation: the person asking is wasting time, being unhelpful and unproductive asking questions
Not at all. I haven’t once felt like the person asking was wasting time, being unhelpful, or being unproductive asking questions. My comment was simply saying that it is immensely more helpful and productive [to a person entering Elixir for the first time] to read Elixir docs and guides and, where accessible, the language/stdlib source (it’s all Elixir), because it pays serious and continuous dividends on the journey of mastering the language—compared to jumping in deep before you’ve built an intuitive understanding of how it works. It wasn’t a slight or an insult.
It was the same advice I received early in my career in a completely different language that has proven itself true with every language I’ve learned since.
> Translation: the person asking must not be doing their job because they don't understand things the way I do (I'm a software perfectionist, ofc)
Amusing weaponization of my HN profile, but your translation is still unfair. Complaining about memorizing a handful of guard functions felt to me like complaining about doing the job. I don’t expect anyone to understand things the way I do. Nor was I trying to backhandedly insult or taunt.
I spend nearly half my working hours each week reviewing thousands of lines of Elixir code from hundreds of engineers, pairing with 10s of them, helping people learn, explaining how things work, and learning new things myself alongside them every day. Every time anyone doesn’t understand something, it’s an opportunity for us to pair up, dig in, review docs, come up with new explanations, show off code to explain and cement concepts, etc. That’s not the same thing as complaining and labeling something as a language problem, have multiple people trying to help explain it, but keep saying “but it’s not obvious and doesn’t match my expectations, so that’s Language X’s fault.”