Erlang is a general-purpose, concurrent, functional programming language designed for building massively scalable, soft real-time systems with high availability requirements.
Erlang Anti-Patterns Overview
Using Processes for Everything
Not Using OTP Behaviors
Using List Concatenation in Loops
++
for list concatenation in loops. Instead, use list prepending ([Head | Tail]
) and reverse the result at the end if order matters.Not Using Pattern Matching Effectively
Using String Operations Inefficiently
Not Using Records or Maps for Structured Data
Not Using Proper Error Handling
{ok, Result}
and {error, Reason}
) and propagate errors up the call stack.Not Using try/catch Appropriately
try/catch
for control flow. In Erlang, it’s more idiomatic to use pattern matching, guard clauses, and tagged tuples for error handling.Not Using Proper Supervision Trees
Using send/receive Without Timeouts
receive
to prevent processes from blocking indefinitely if the expected message never arrives.Not Using ETS Tables Appropriately
Not Using Proper Module Structure
Not Using Proper Documentation
Not Using Dialyzer and Type Specs
Not Using Proper Application Structure
Not Using Proper Process Naming
Not Using Proper Message Patterns
Using list:foreach Instead of list Comprehensions
lists:map
for transforming lists. lists:foreach
is only for side effects and doesn’t return a useful value.Not Using Proper Testing