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Switching to Elixir

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Re: Switching to Elixir

#171

Post by dartos »

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…

Static vs dynamic types are whatever.

Weak typing is what causes all sorts of issues.

With dynamic strong types, you can still have a tool like dialyzer figure out potential type issues before shipping, but weak typing means anything goes.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#172

Post by sph »

kelipso wrote: post #163
sph wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a hype phase. Types are cool, but in the past few years they seem to be the panacea for all problems, by inexperienced engineers that have got their first taste of Rust and Typescript. As if writing in Typescript would produce less buggy, more stable or more maintainable applications than using Elixir. I'll say types are cool again before I get routed by angry static typing zealots.

Frankly, we really need to instill the "types are cool" concept into inexperienced engineers. That insanely long phase in software engineering where people said dynamic types are cool was a huge mistake and ruined a lot of newbie minds.

"Think of the chil^H^H^H^Hinexperienced engineers! We must save them from PHP and Python!"

Enough pearl clutching. No one's mind was "ruined".

Re: Switching to Elixir

#173

Post by [deleted] »

da39a3ee wrote: post #83

> There are no classes, no instances, no inheritance I don't know anything about Elixir, but it bothers me when people claim that languages like Rust and Go are "not object oriented". If you create structs and have special syntax for defining functions that operate on instances of those structs, then those are called objects and you are doing OOP. Just because some Java people came up with a definition of OOP that sa…

[deleted]

Re: Switching to Elixir

#174

Post by fyokdrigd »

elixir is awful, mid-long term.

you write mix new something. it generates tons of code which will NEVER be update when the template gets update for new people running mix new something.

then all the liveview magic happens with JavaScript code writen by someone who will not be there when major browser security model changes happen (and google make sure these happens every 3mo). then who will keep updating the magic js?

Re: Switching to Elixir

#175

Post by bo0tzz »

lucasyvas wrote: post #166
mstipetic wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time an elixir discussion starts a vocal segment of people just starts complaining about types. Ok we get it you like types, can you leave the rest of us in peace

To be fair, it's the author's fault this time. They brought it up at the very beginning in the third paragraph. The author's joy will also be short-lived because static typing is coming and will likely win out if the implementation is solid.

The upcoming typesystem for Elixir will be a gradual type system, so you will not be required to write any types even after it lands (and you will still benefit from the typechecker either way).

Re: Switching to Elixir

#176

Post by kaashif »

sph wrote: post #160
mstipetic wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time an elixir discussion starts a vocal segment of people just starts complaining about types. Ok we get it you like types, can you leave the rest of us in peace

It's just a hype phase. Types are cool, but in the past few years they seem to be the panacea for all problems, by inexperienced engineers that have got their first taste of Rust and Typescript. As if writing in Typescript would produce less buggy, more stable or more maintainable applications than using Elixir. I'll say types are cool again before I get routed by angry static typing zealots.

> As if writing in Typescript would produce less buggy, more stable or more maintainable applications than using Elixir.

I have news for you. A lot of people, including me, do know that catching an entire class of bugs at compile time makes your code less buggy.

The trade-off as usually stated is that more things are possible with more dynamic code, and statically typed code is slower to develop with.

Elixir has much more interesting features that have nothing to do with the types/no types discussion and I 100% agree it would be more interesting to discuss those instead.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#177

Post by kaashif »

MatthiasPortzel wrote: post #167
aerhardt wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I literally struggle to read and work with dynamic code. My head explodes when trying to hold return types or the shape of semi-complex data structures in my head, versus having it spelled out. I wouldn't call it an issue of "perception", I really think in my case it's "capability", pure and simple. I've programmed for thousands of hours in both styles, so we're well past the possibility of this being an adaptation p…

I’m a proponent of dynamic typing. I’d say the same thing. I don’t have enough working memory in my head to store the compile-time type information about every relevant variable, in addition to the actually important information about what the runtime data could be. The way that I write static-typed code is by imagining how I would write dynamic code to solve the problem, and then additionally imagining what types an…

> I don’t have enough working memory in my head to store the compile-time type information about every relevant variable

Neither do I, but I know the compiler will check that for me so I don't need to hold all of that in working memory. I know my IDE will always be able to tell me the types too, and flag if anything is wrong immediately.

The different points of view on this are really interesting.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#178

Post by prophesi »

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…

Does José need to write up an elixir-lang.org blog post every other week on the status of their type system project for HN's collective memory to know it's in the works?

Re: Switching to Elixir

#179

Post by weatherlight »

artdigital wrote: post #41
weatherlight wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because of unification/pattern-matching you have a pretty good idea, just looking at function name + args what the shape of the data is going to be.

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…

That’s okay. I’d rather do that once in a while to keep all of elixir’s dynamic traits. The fact that you can open a REPL, and open one in prod, do language introspection, inspect data, query DBs with ecto, do hot code swapping is amazing.

Until we have something like Set Theoretical Types, I think this is the best of both worlds.

Re: Switching to Elixir

#180

Post by sBqQu3U0wH »

jacquesm wrote: post #152
sBqQu3U0wH wrote: post #139

>A few months ago I started a new job at a company that uses Elixir as its main language >I've never written a line of Elixir or Erlang before in my life How is this possible?

It's possible because the number of programmers that have been exposed to Erlang and Elixir is a very small fraction of the total. Besides, many programmers go through their whole career in a single eco-system (.NET, Java, C, C++, COBOL, PHP etc).

Hmm, I was dabbling with Elixir for quite some time now, but never considered myself proficient enough for applying to Elixir jobs. May be worth a try.
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