Its cool
Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language
221–230 of 426 posts
Re: Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language
#222I 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…
If you're only willing to use languages with the same features, what's the point? Learning how a different paradigm manages without types can be more insightful.
Because the BEAM has much more to it than a terrible dynamic type system?
Re: Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the lack of parentheses is whats throwing me off regularly with Elixir.
I find the optional parentheses, and the way that keyword lists are defined to be the two biggest stumbling blocks when I come back to Elixir after a while way. Coming from other languages, I find that example("with", 3, extra: "arguments", as: "a", keyword: "list") being equivalent to example("with", 3, [extra: "arguments", as: "a", keyword: "list"]) and example "with", 3, extra: "arguments", as: "a", keyword: "list…
one more ;)
example("with", 3, [{:extra, "arguments"}, {:as, "a"}, {:keyword, "list"}])
iex> [{:extra, "arguments"}, {:as, "a"}, {:keyword, "list"}] = [extra: "arguments", as: "a", keyword: "list"]
[extra: "arguments", as: "a", keyword: "list"]Re: Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language
#224[deleted]
Re: Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language
#225Honest 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…
> Rewriting critical software infrastructure (infostructure) to more reliable typed languages Instagram (and Threads) is still using Django, which is even slower than Rails. Once you get to unicorn scale, your app is going to bespoke, with some microservices, and super custom stuff. If you can go faster in a gradually typed language, that can be a very good reason to choose one. > untyped languages are not performant…
> Typing generally slows down languages, not speed them up because of all the additional checks that must be done.
Source? You seem to be talking about compile-time versus runtime, and I've not even heard of compile times being significantly slowed by type checking.
> The dynamic stuff is part of what slows down languages like Python and makes them tricky to optimize.
That seems to harm rather than help your previous claim. In untyped languages, in principle every object has to be treated as dynamic.
Re: Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language
#226Honest 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…
IMO all of these higher level languages that were designed for humans have a very short lifespan at this point. The only thing propping them up seems to be loyalty for the most part.
Yeah we’ll see how that goes when the VC subsidies run dry and everybody gets corralled into token-based pricing.
Re: Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 v…
> 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.
As someone who works exclusively in typed languages for formal methods, what is it you find lacking about modern Python + PyLance? IMO there's still a tiny verbosity issue, and there's no real replacement for fancier polymorphism or (G)ADTs, but I'm very satisfied with it for most things. In particular, null checks are trivial.
Re: Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language
#228Every modern language must have every feature. Does this come from GitHub centric development where every proposal is eventually asked for?
Re: Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language
#229At the same time, it makes Clojure look like the fascinating "control group" in this industry-wide experiment.
Re: Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 v…
> 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. As someone who works exclusively in typed languages for formal methods, what is it you find lacking about modern Python + PyLance? IMO there's still a tiny verbosity issue, and there's no real replacement for fancier polymorphism or (G)ADTs, but I'm very satisfied with it for most things.…
It has been about 10 years since Python was a daily driver for me and at that time I wrote it the old fashioned way with no type hints and no static checking, just like grandma used to make. The times I have needed to dig back into it have involved working on old code, so I haven't kept up with modern tooling.
However, in principle any dynamically typed language can be tolerable to me if it can be turned into a statically typed language ;)
But I think I'd still prefer the ergonomics of a language designed that way from the start vs having bolt-ons. My favorite language for the past several years has been F# and I think ML-family languages in general strike a great balance of being able to write terse code when you want to, and being able to model a domain really well with types when you want to.