Uncovering and Addressing Elixir Code Smells

In her presentation, Elaine Watanabe discusses how code smells, which are indicators of potential design problems in the software code, can impact code maintainability, readability, and overall quality. Despite being well-studied in object-oriented languages, code smells in a functional language like Elixir provide a unique exploration opportunity. The talk revolves around identifying Elixir-specific code smells, understanding their detrimental impact on applications, and applying practical refactoring strategies to alleviate these issues. Watanabe highlights that code smells are not synonymous with bugs, but symptoms of poor design choices that may slow development and introduce risks in the future. She also emphasizes the importance of small, behavior-preserving transformations as the cornerstone of refactoring. Throughout her talk, Watanabe presents various traditional and Elixir-specific code smell examples and their corresponding refactoring techniques, aiming for more maintainable and understandable code. Additionally, she points out the importance of having a common terminology to identify code smells, making it easier to discuss and resolve these issues among developers.