Exploring Early Return Techniques in Elixir

The article discusses the absence of an explicit early return mechanism in Elixir and presents various functional programming alternatives to achieve similar outcomes. Techniques covered include pattern matching, which allows functions to exit early by immediately matching and handling specific conditions, and guard clauses, which add extra conditions to function definitions. The author also explores case and cond statements, which handle multiple conditions within a function, as well as the with statement, suitable for chaining operations that may fail. Finally, the article reviews the use of throw and catch constructs to handle unexpected errors, though it advises against their use for routine input validation.