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Switching to Elixir

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Re: Switching to Elixir

#141

Post by ThinkBeat »

I love BEAM since I was first introduced to Erlang. I think it should be adopted a lot more for codebases and that it solves a lot of problems in a good way that are currently solved in bad ways in modern trends.

Clearly there are strong preferences among folks for static or dynamic typing, almost like vi vs emacs.

My opinion is on typing is:

Stating typing does not slow you down.

With dynamic typing while you are writing code you have to plan and remember what type a variable of some sort represents before You can act on it.

With static languages most type of variables will be known at compile time and can offer good feedback if a type is used in the wrong manner. It also makes it much easier to know what a variable is and what it might be doing if it has an official type.

Reading dynamic code I often have to search around a bit to figure out what a variable is.

I think if the only reason it is "problematic" to have static typing is because writing "int", "string" etc. is too much work then your priorities are mixed up.

Sometimes people resort to Hungarian notation to help out. (Less and less) sName,iAge,etc. That is helpful but you might as well have static typing at that point.

There has been a lot of work done to find a good way to add (optional) static typing to Elixir and I think it is on going but represents a hard problem.

I am glad Gleam is out (https://gleam.run/), it is my favorite BEAM language now.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#142

Post by akkad33 »

spion wrote: post #135
wofo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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've been on both camps, so I'm hoping I can give some insight. Lots of statically typed languages are very strict about their types and have too many of them. You have to admit, when you're trying to build something difficult and focus on getting the business logic part of your program right, the last thing you want to be thinking about is e.g. whether you need a String, ByteString, LazyByteString or any of the othe…

> you need a String, ByteString, LazyByteString or any of the other types of strings,

Out of curiosity, which language do you use where this kind of decision has to be made for daily programming problems?

Re: Switching to Elixir

#143

Post by solidninja »

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…

Nice to see that I'm not the only one - lasted 9 months trying to adapt to Elixir and couldn't. My background is Scala/Rust with heavy use of effect systems and reliance on writing the types out and then solving the puzzle of how to make everything fit. The tooling is pretty poor due to lack of investment compared to some of the other languages, and the debugging story is not great either. But hey, it works for some.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#144

Post by spion »

akkad33 wrote: post #142
spion wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been on both camps, so I'm hoping I can give some insight. Lots of statically typed languages are very strict about their types and have too many of them. You have to admit, when you're trying to build something difficult and focus on getting the business logic part of your program right, the last thing you want to be thinking about is e.g. whether you need a String, ByteString, LazyByteString or any of the othe…

> you need a String, ByteString, LazyByteString or any of the other types of strings, Out of curiosity, which language do you use where this kind of decision has to be made for daily programming problems?

This particular example with the string types was Haskell, but Rust often makes you think about performance decisions at all times as well. I'm fully aware that that's the point of Rust, however (and yes there are ways to stop worrying and just `clone`)

Re: Switching to Elixir

#145

Post by solidninja »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #115
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 really don't like not knowing what format data is in. Which is orthogonal to what the type is The shape of the data is much simpler to handle in Elixir than in, to name one, Java. > a vast number of possible errors caught at compile time if it's a vast number, usually it's because either: - you're not familiar with the code base (and you'll make a vast number of other kinds of errors) - you're making a huge refac…

Static typing can replace input validation though - if you make illegal states unrepresentable. That way you bake validation into your types e.g. using refined types: https://blog.rockthejvm.com/refined-types/ in Scala

Re: Switching to Elixir

#146

Post by mejutoco »

d3ckard wrote: post #134
wofo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 believe this as well. I like dynamic typing, because it often feels to me that rigour of static typing is slowing the prototyping phase. Plus overusing types creates a lot of boilerplate. In one of the frontends I've seen adding a boolean field to a form required changing over 10 files - thank you Typescript. On the other hand, sometimes I feel like it has a lot to do with test writing. I feel people enjoy static t…

I mostly agree with you. Just wanted to add that in some languages, for example in Typescript, there are ways to say that you do not care about the type for prototyping. For example using :unknown or :any.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#147

Post by hahn-kev »

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 actually think it's pretty similar to different automated testing camps. Some people say they build faster with TDD, and others say it slows them down.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#148

Post by toolz »

zoogeny wrote: post #70
throwawaymaths wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> looking at the magic of LiveView (and LiveBook) What's the magic? I think it's pretty easy to get a correct mental model of everything in livebook maybe excepting exact details of how the diff calculation/data compression works. Even so, you can spy on the websocket messages and get a reasonable picture of what's going on in a pinch. Liveview is incredibly straightforward.

> Liveview is incredibly straightforward. I don't agree. One of the keynotes from the 2023 ElixirConf was Chris McCord (one of the principle developers of LiveView) describing how it is almost 1.0 [1]. One thing that made me laugh a bit was him emphasizing how much Javascript he's had to write (he was referencing the fact that there is an internal community meme that you can achieve such incredible behaviors without…

This isn't really contextualizing the problem space well imo. How many companies exclusively used react pre-1.0? How many people using the "straight forward" vueJS had ever read the source code to understand the internals?

When someone says that liveview is straightforward, they aren't comparing it to stable backend languages that almost exclusively run on one operating system and one architecture and they certainly aren't referring to the many hacks every JS library incorporates to make the library more useful.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#149

Post by aerhardt »

hosh wrote: post #68
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'm currently working on a data engineering team, unborking some things on a team where all the original developers of the codebase had left. Up until then, I wrote Ruby for over 10 years, and Elixir for 3. I didn't have an opinion about JS or Typescript before this project. Typescript does not solve the fundamental problems of JS. I'm not convinced it really solved the issues related to ingesting data from many diff…

> I'm not convinced it really solved the issues related to ingesting data from many different data sources

That sounds like external data validation and I don't think a type system can really solve that. Even if you're using C#, Java, Scala, or what-have-you, you're going to have that issue. If that's what you expected from TypeScript, then yea, I can see how you'd be sorely disappointed...

Like many others, the advantage of type systems for me is in how they reduce cognitive load thanks to their explicitness, even in solo projects. I literally have a hard time remembering the types returned by a function I wrote a mere few hours ago... I have come to believe that there are two broad types of dynamic typing programmers: those who don't know better, and those who have a superior working memory, or cognitive ability, such that types hinder them rather than help them.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#150

Post by jacquesm »

hahn-kev wrote: post #147
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 actually think it's pretty similar to different automated testing camps. Some people say they build faster with TDD, and others say it slows them down.

Usually it is because people have a short term view of software, but in practice software lives for much longer than most people can imagine at the time of writing and that initial burst of productivity when working on a new system is even more present in a type-free and test-free environment.

But once that honeymoon phase is over you usually realize that types and tests were invented for a reason and beyond a certain level of complexity they are absolute must-haves if you want to have high confidence it all works as advertised and to be able to effectively refactor your code.

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