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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

#201

Post by FeteCommuniste »

mountainriver wrote: post #185
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…

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.

So the future of programming is asking an LLM to spit out the appropriate assembly?

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

#202

Post by elitehacker1337 »

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 been using Ruby and Elixir for over a decade. Pre-AI I used them for aesthetic reasons. The code was beautiful, and I disliked dealing with types.

People without experience in dynamic languages tend to overestimate the number of bugs their type system is saving them from. It’s pretty rare that I run into a bug in production that a type system would have caught.

They also overstate how much types help their AI agents write code. I haven’t seen AI write a type related bug in years at this point.

I work with typescript on the front end, and my experience is totally different there. AI is constantly introducing type errors, but only because the original type wasn’t declared properly. Agents waste a ton of time and tokens appeasing typescript. Ruby and Elixir are very token efficient in comparison.

That said, now that I am not writing code by hand anymore, I am considering switching to something like Go. Mainly so I can run my side projects on smaller machines

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

#203

Post by DonaldPShimoda »

meghprkh wrote: post #172
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 st…

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

This depends entirely on context. In the Benjamin C. Pierce school of thought (a common choice in programming langauges research; see his book Types and Programming Languages, 2002), "typed" means what we typically call statically typed, i.e., the language employs a static analysis to prevent the compilation/execution of (some subset of) faulty programs. Meanwhile, languages that are commonly called "dynamically typed" are, in this school of thought, not typed (or "untyped"). (TAPL provides a more rigorous definition, but it's in the other room and I am lazy.)

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

#204

Post by pdpi »

bad_haircut72 wrote: post #129
pdpi wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you don't get bugs related to typing because elixir is somehow magic, I've never followed Elixir particularly closely, but what I saw in some Erlang discussions was different. Discourse there was that you need to gracefully handle failure anyhow, so type errors can (should?) just get handled by the failure recovery machinery you're supposed to have anyhow. I disagree with that point of view, but it's much more defe…

you succumb to the fallacy that because the compiler let it through, the code wont have any error - the erlang mentality says that the compiler/CPU/everything has errors, how do you handle errors in the general sense

I'm not succumbing to any such fallacy.

Compile-time checks don't obviate the need for runtime error handling, and I love the robustness of Erlang's runtime error handling. However, that doesn't change the fact that we should be catching and handling errors as early as possible, and there's a whole bunch of logic errors that you can easily catch at compile time.

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

#205

Post by Gimpei »

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 don’t understand this question at all. Types are there to prevent human programmers from making a certain class of mistakes. But is the same true for AI. Because if not, static types are just needless cruft.

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

#206

Post by abrookewood »

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…

Honestly, I think you're framing this incorrectly. Twitter, Airbnd and Shopify all managed to get massive using Ruby on Rails. Maybe that was part of the reason why? I.e. they were able to move fast and developers were happy.

I don't use Rails, so don't have any skin in the game. But who cares if you have to do a re-write once you get to that size?

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

#207

Post by veqq »

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…

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.

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

#208

Post by recroad »

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 use Elixir not because of typed/untyped, but because of BEAM and OTP.

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

#209

Post by infamia »

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…

> 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. The dynamic stuff is part of what slows down languages like Python and makes them tricky to optimize.

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

#210

Post by mixolydianagain »

asa400 wrote: post #186
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…

This framing is misleading. I'm not sure what AI has to do with any of the examples you cited. All of the examples you cited are moves - and in some cases, not even moves, as Shopify is not ditching Ruby - to more performant runtimes and architectures in response to operational concerns at scale, which have a tenuous link to language, and no link to AI that I can see, as these companies all significantly predate LLMs…

> to more performant runtimes and architectures in response to operational concerns at scale, which have a tenuous link to language

The runtime performance and the language are deeply linked. None of the dynamically typed runtimes you mention are actually performance competitive with JVM languages.

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