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Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language

elixir-lang.org

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Re: Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language

#171

Post by cubefox »

isityettime wrote: post #75
sevenzero wrote: post #2

Oh shit here I go (and learn Elixir for a whole year (again)) again. I love everything about Elixir, but Elixir constantly makes me doubt myself like no other language. My brain isnt made for functional stuff, but this makes me want to try again. Sucks that it's not really a beginner friendly ecosystem and usually, when having questions answered, people assume you already know a lot about the language.

> I love everything about Elixir, but Elixir constantly makes me doubt myself like no other language. My brain isnt made for functional stuff, but this makes me want to try again. I experienced this really painfully when I was in college and took a kind of "survey of programming paradigms" course and tried Haskell for the first time. I'd been programming for years by then, and I couldn't believe how helpless I was at…

> But I don't think it's about the brain not being suited, I think it's that contrast of your experience level in imperative languages vs. the fact that when working in a pure functional style, you start out as a newbie again.

When I was in university, the introductory class was about Java, and an advanced class in the next semester was about Haskell. There were many imperative/functional newbies in both classes, but the Haskell class still progressed much more slowly. Haskell is simply much harder to grasp, independently of experience.

You can also see this in the fact that even mathematicians use Python rather than Haskell for simulations. Despite the fact that there is no population that is better suited for Haskell than mathematicians.

Even cookbooks are always written in an imperative style, never in a functional one. Why is that? Human brains find imperative algorithms simply more intuitive, and this is not explained by not being used to functional ones.

Re: Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language

#172

Post by meghprkh »

teleforce wrote: post #163

Honest question, in the era of vibe and AI assisted coding is there any advantages of using untyped programming languages, apart from the fact that non-typed languages has more traning data for the LLM? This probably controversial, but personally I consider untyped languages as technical debts that need to be fixed sooner or later, and the OP article is partly addressing this very issue. Rewriting critical software i…

Not necessarily. Since the word "typed" language is not well-defined.

For example, typescript is a fantastic language for marshalling data and UI state since it uses substructural typing instead of nominal typing. Libraries like kysely / other ORM libraries are great examples too and easy to use, whereas in fully typed languages like Rust you would end up having to use a macro library like sqlx or having to define structs for each of your types (which would increase compile time & size)

Re: Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language

#173

Post by eager_learner »

dzogchen wrote: post #89

The past month I have been going through the Elixir exercism.io track https://exercism.org/tracks/elixir It is really excellent!

whats so excellent about it? i tried their ruby, swift and python tracks and i was left with a meh. i tried 30% of the Ruby path for instance and its just "do this" and " if you get stuck here are the docs".... and it calls itself " a learning path", there is nothing to learn.

Re: Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language

#174

Post by kensai »

replwoacause wrote: post #169
teleforce wrote: post #163

Honest question, in the era of vibe and AI assisted coding is there any advantages of using untyped programming languages, apart from the fact that non-typed languages has more traning data for the LLM? This probably controversial, but personally I consider untyped languages as technical debts that need to be fixed sooner or later, and the OP article is partly addressing this very issue. Rewriting critical software i…

I've used untyped languages extensively, and even built my own, and the errors I get at runtime are almost never type-based, and that's even more true now that LLMs can pump out code. For all the additional ceremony types add, I can't say I've personally realized their benefit.

This reminds me of the analogy of the smoking grandpa. I had a grandpa that was chainsmoking his whole life and managed to reach 90 and died of other causes. This does not mean smoking is "relatively safe".

Re: Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language

#175

Post by aeonfox »

replwoacause wrote: post #169
teleforce wrote: post #163

Honest question, in the era of vibe and AI assisted coding is there any advantages of using untyped programming languages, apart from the fact that non-typed languages has more traning data for the LLM? This probably controversial, but personally I consider untyped languages as technical debts that need to be fixed sooner or later, and the OP article is partly addressing this very issue. Rewriting critical software i…

I've used untyped languages extensively, and even built my own, and the errors I get at runtime are almost never type-based, and that's even more true now that LLMs can pump out code. For all the additional ceremony types add, I can't say I've personally realized their benefit.

I've definitely found LLM code to be syntactically/semantically correct in one-shot pretty much all the time. It's usually the functional specification/behaviour that's found wanting.

Typing probably makes sense where memory-correctness needs to be enforced (e.g. Rust), and inferring those semantics require a much wider context. But memory-correctness isn't really something that afflicts BEAM languages.

Re: Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language

#176

Post by rspeele »

replwoacause wrote: post #169
teleforce wrote: post #163

Honest question, in the era of vibe and AI assisted coding is there any advantages of using untyped programming languages, apart from the fact that non-typed languages has more traning data for the LLM? This probably controversial, but personally I consider untyped languages as technical debts that need to be fixed sooner or later, and the OP article is partly addressing this very issue. Rewriting critical software i…

I've used untyped languages extensively, and even built my own, and the errors I get at runtime are almost never type-based, and that's even more true now that LLMs can pump out code. For all the additional ceremony types add, I can't say I've personally realized their benefit.

> the errors I get at runtime are almost never type-based

That surprises me, but everyone's experiences are different. I've been in the statically typed language space for so long and enjoyed it so much, I find it pretty irritating to go back to Python (my long-ago favorite) but many people are in the exact opposite frame of mind. I'm curious: what kinds of errors do you classify as a type-based error? I think that varies from person to person.

For example, null references. A C programmer would say dereferencing a null is not a type-based error, because it's not feasible to encode non-nullable pointers in the C type system. A Haskell programmer would say it is a type-based error because Haskell makes it difficult not to encode this in the type system, you really have to go out of your way to create a runtime null dereference error.

A C# or TypeScript programmer could answer differently depending on who you ask, because both of those languages make it possible to leverage the typechecker to prevent null-deref at compile time, but neither one makes it required (you can turn those checks off or make them warnings if you like), so it depends on the programmer's build settings and how much typechecking they personally have chosen to use.

Re: Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language

#177

Post by yeetosaurusrex »

I wanted to use functional programming in actual projects and Elixir's lack of static types almost stopped me from picking it up initially.

I tried it out and, although I do miss static types sometimes, immutability and not having to deal with inheritance and other OO abstractions has made the trade-off worth it for me.

Yes some people do claim that pattern matching makes up for the lack of static types. I don't agree with that, but can say that anecdotally the number of type related bugs I notice in *my* Elixir code is much lower than the number of similar bugs I used to write in languages like Python. Whether that's because of common usage of pattern matching, or community adherence to patterns like returning tuples of {:ok, result} | {:error, error}, or something else is anyone's guess.

An important point not in the heading is that gradual typing has been added without any new language syntax.

It's still not statically typed. Maybe it never will be, but this is a step in the right direction and at least they're trying.

Re: Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language

#178

Post by lo_zamoyski »

yeetosaurusrex wrote: post #177

I wanted to use functional programming in actual projects and Elixir's lack of static types almost stopped me from picking it up initially. I tried it out and, although I do miss static types sometimes, immutability and not having to deal with inheritance and other OO abstractions has made the trade-off worth it for me. Yes some people do claim that pattern matching makes up for the lack of static types. I don't agre…

You might find Gleam[0] a better fit.

[0] https://gleam.run/

Re: Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language

#179

Post by deterministic »

alprado50 wrote: post #108

Maybe it is only my experience, but i feel that languages that were not typed since the begining never work as well as "true" typed ones.

Typescript is brilliant and should be carefully studied by anybody introducing a type system to a single typed ("untyped") language.

Re: Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language

#180

Post by epolanski »

teleforce wrote: post #163

Honest question, in the era of vibe and AI assisted coding is there any advantages of using untyped programming languages, apart from the fact that non-typed languages has more traning data for the LLM? This probably controversial, but personally I consider untyped languages as technical debts that need to be fixed sooner or later, and the OP article is partly addressing this very issue. Rewriting critical software i…

I tried to get into elixir and ruby, but my mind just refuses statically untyped languages apparently.

I'm even less prone to use them with AI.

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