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Switching to Elixir

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Re: Switching to Elixir

#121

Post by ra »

wofo wrote: post #107
byhemechi wrote: post #34

I often see people say static typing slows them down and I'd really like to know why that is because for me it's the exact opposite, I really don't like not knowing what format data is in. I'd much rather have to write slightly more verbose code and have a vast number of possible errors caught at compile time instead of having things go wrong in production when someone inputs something a bit weird with nothing so muc…

Lack of proper types is what killed the joy of programming in Elixir for me (I lasted 6 months, hoping I would somehow adapt, but the experience was so miserable that I decided to move on). I simply can't understand how anyone can be productive in a big codebase without the rigor of static typing, but those people exist, so I guess there must be something about our brains that divides us in the dynamic vs static typi…

> I guess there must be something about our brains that divides us in the dynamic vs static typing camps.

I've wondered if that's a thing. It seems to be.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#122

Post by dorian-graph »

zoogeny wrote: post #56

I have been watching Elixir YouTube videos pretty much every day for the last few weeks. I guess there was an Elixir conference recently and after I watched a couple, YouTube has been sending me a consistent stream of Elixir content. I really want to try out this language. I love the idea of Erlang but the few times I've had to deal with it (an ejabberd chat server was one) I found it to be a bit too quirky. Every vi…

> There is a huge risk in niche languages and platforms. Hard to hire for, hard to find libraries for, hard to find blogs/tutorials/etc. With alternatives like Go having a pretty respectable concurrency story ... it is pretty hard to justify taking the risk on such a small community.

People say this every time Elixir comes up, but, I would like to hear evidence of this being true.

I worked at a startup for a couple of years and had never used Elixir. The majority of the engineers who worked there, whilst I did, also hadn't. We had a few who were experts in the language and a couple who had well-known open source packages.

Genuinely from my experience, each of the things in your list are simply not true.

> But I get concerned looking at the magic of LiveView (and LiveBook).

What magic? Again, genuinely questioning this.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#123

Post by sensanaty »

rishav_sharan wrote: post #52
byhemechi wrote: post #34

I often see people say static typing slows them down and I'd really like to know why that is because for me it's the exact opposite, I really don't like not knowing what format data is in. I'd much rather have to write slightly more verbose code and have a vast number of possible errors caught at compile time instead of having things go wrong in production when someone inputs something a bit weird with nothing so muc…

I just moved from typescript to javascript and for me it was just that I own the database, i own the api surfaces and as such I don't need to enforce any kind of type checking as the api schemas are sufficient for my case. I would definitely use type safety if I had a lot of external data sources. or if there are lots of people working with me. Otherwise, I am beginning to go back to dynamic languages at least for we…

I don't really write huge complex types in TS, I basically stick to just the native data objects like string, number, boolean etc., but even then I find it so useful just for the autocomplete that you get out of it.

I jumped into some code I haven't touched in half a year the other day so had 0 recollection of any of it, thankfully cause of the types I knew exactly what to pass where and what to expect back without even having to read any of the code other than the type definitions.

I love me some dynamic languages, but damn if it isn't nice to have that kinda power available to you.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#124

Post by bradrn »

Dowwie wrote: post #119
byhemechi wrote: post #34

I often see people say static typing slows them down and I'd really like to know why that is because for me it's the exact opposite, I really don't like not knowing what format data is in. I'd much rather have to write slightly more verbose code and have a vast number of possible errors caught at compile time instead of having things go wrong in production when someone inputs something a bit weird with nothing so muc…

The lack of types is hard to defend. Yet, the failed pattern match triggered at runtime becomes immediately obvious from the stack trace. You fix the pattern and move on. The cost of this mild inconvenience is still far less than the cost of satisfying types. This aside, I want typed elixir.

> This aside, I want typed elixir.

It’s happening: https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2023/06/22/type-system-updates-...

Re: Switching to Elixir

#125

Post by andrewstuart »

byhemechi wrote: post #34

I often see people say static typing slows them down and I'd really like to know why that is because for me it's the exact opposite, I really don't like not knowing what format data is in. I'd much rather have to write slightly more verbose code and have a vast number of possible errors caught at compile time instead of having things go wrong in production when someone inputs something a bit weird with nothing so muc…

It slowed me down until I had enough experience then it sped me up.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#126

Post by ctrlmeta »

> A few months ago I started a new job at a company that uses Elixir

> In fact, I might go as far as saying that Elixir gives you a fun language (like Ruby) while leaving out the stateful footguns OOP languages give you.

I don't mean to discount the author's experiences and opinion in this post. It's a nice post with a lot of good food for thought. Likewise I want to share only my own experience here. Two months into any new programming language, it feels like a fun language. Eventually the novelty factor wears off. And then it becomes a boring language. And I say "boring" in a positive sense.

The daily driver languages should be boring. Should present no surprises. Get the job done and get out of my way. When we transistion from the fun phase to that boring phase, what matters more is how good the language is fundamentally designed. As an example in Elixir the pattern matching abilities are great but I don't know if I could justify choosing a language without compile-time type safety in this day and age!

Re: Switching to Elixir

#127

Post by _flux »

knallfrosch wrote: post #111
mijamo wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it vastly depends what you're writing. Any kind of function that does not have a fixed input and output gets a lot more complex with static types. And by extension any code that depends on that also gets more complex. I tried at some point to use Rust for an API but then I depended on making calls to a very complex API. In JavaScript I would have just gotten back a complex object where I can then pick whateve…

> Any kind of function that does not have a fixed input and output gets a lot more complex with static types. If you don't know what kind of data people give your function and you don't know what's supposed to happen, how can you write that function? I think many people use too strict of a type system. If your function works with any object that has a toString()->string function, then just write an in-line interface…

You perhaps know, but I believe one should prefer the "unknown" type in TypeScript in such scenarios. Of course, then you need to check what its type actually is to make use of it, but this time TS checks that you do.

Btw, the equivalent in Python (and MyPy/pyright) is object.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#128

Post by 59nadir »

h0l0cube wrote: post #55
artdigital wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who worked with Elixir for the past couple years, and maintains multiple libraries in Elixir - nah not really. Static typing is the thing I'm missing with Elixir. No matter how much pattern matching you do, and how many typespecs you add to get a better understanding of what's behind a variable, you'll still run into issues at runtime frequently that could have been avoided if it was statically typed. Dial…

> You'll always run into situations where the shape of data is not clear If you're using typespecs, then I think the deficiency is with tooling. I think the language servers (like ElixirLS) were quite buggy for a while, but it's getting better at code completion and inspection. But if the type has no spec then you're in the same situation as any gradually typed language.

If by "defiency is with tooling" you mean that `dialyzer` is bad, then yes. The current type checking facilities that it provides are too lax and also sometimes demonstrably actually incorrect even in the face of the simplest examples.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#129

Post by josephg »

miroljub wrote: post #106
olivermuty wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elixir dev here, just to put the context in place first hehe. Couldn’t that thing be typed as the web format? A nested set of string props with either string or number types in the leaves. Then use those types to traverse and pull into «real» types? I like to put structured data into structs in elixir too and the above is essentially what I would do in Elixir. I don’t know rust well enough to see if I am missing some…

You can do that in every language, even in Java 1.0, by just using a hash maps of objects, and cast those objects to whatever you like at runtime before accessing them. But then, you are basically throwing out your static type checks and just using it as a dynamic language, but with much more verbosity, cruft and additional ways to should yourself in the foot.

Yep. It’s awkward. The language fights you every step of the way and it becomes hard to read and write your code. x.foo = 6 becomes x.set(String(“foo”), Num(6));. When you read that value back you’ll need to unwrap the type you expect before you can do anything with it. It would be utterly miserable. You’d be much better off just using Python, JavaScript or Ruby.

You also lose all of the performance benefits typing brings, and gain nothing in return. In JavaScript land, V8 moves heaven and earth to guess what your types are and optimistically compile your code behind the scenes assuming its type annotations are correct. Then it dynamically deoptimises and reoptimises at runtime with that new information, while your program runs. As well as being ugly, the equivalent “dynamically typed” rust program would have none of V8’s smarts. It would run dog slow compared to normal rust and still way slower than the (much cleaner) JavaScript equivalent.

Like wood, programming languages all have a grain. If you program in harmony with the language’s design, everything will seem easy. Compiler errors make sense. The standard library will seem useful and well designed. Program against the language’s design and you’ll hate every minute of it.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#130

Post by conradfr »

sensanaty wrote: post #123
rishav_sharan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just moved from typescript to javascript and for me it was just that I own the database, i own the api surfaces and as such I don't need to enforce any kind of type checking as the api schemas are sufficient for my case. I would definitely use type safety if I had a lot of external data sources. or if there are lots of people working with me. Otherwise, I am beginning to go back to dynamic languages at least for we…

I don't really write huge complex types in TS, I basically stick to just the native data objects like string, number, boolean etc., but even then I find it so useful just for the autocomplete that you get out of it. I jumped into some code I haven't touched in half a year the other day so had 0 recollection of any of it, thankfully cause of the types I knew exactly what to pass where and what to expect back without e…

You can have strict/strong typing with a dynamic language.

And after all your Typescript code is compiled to Javascript.

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