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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

#211

Post by DoesntMatter22 »

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…

Rails is still fantastic and handles massive load. 15 percent of all US commerce uses Ruby on Rails

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

#212

Post by DoesntMatter22 »

mixolydianagain wrote: post #210
asa400 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They don’t really need to be though. They take far fewer tokens and are still faster to develop with

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

#213

Post by yeetosaurusrex »

veqq wrote: post #207
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.

Yeah I agree learning new paradigms can give you new insights.

There's also a balance between learning new languages for fun and for the insights they give, and wanting to ship.

As an example: Prolog was mind-bending for me when I tried it and I had a lot of fun with it, but I can't imagine using it to build a product (I'm sure other people have though).

Perhaps my first comment sounded more critical than intended. I'm really excited to see where this initiative with set-theoretic types goes, and if it leads to a fully statically typed language then that will be a bonus. If that doesn't happen, then I'm still perfectly happy with the language as it is.

Elixir taught me that I don't need static types as much as I thought.

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

#214

Post by tclancy »

FeteCommuniste wrote: post #201
mountainriver wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, install my punch-card.md skill to get real performance.

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

#215

Post by ch4s3 »

elxr wrote: post #170
arcanemachiner wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The stability of the language is such a blessing. I think that's part of the reason that LLMs do so well with it, despite its relative lack of popularity.

Which models do you use for elixir?

Claude seems to work well.

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

#216

Post by DoesntMatter22 »

elitehacker1337 wrote: post #202
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 ag…

I tried doing my side projects in Go and one thing I miss is the rails console which is so helpful. I guess I could have it write a go console or something but it’s not quite the same

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

#217

Post by culi »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #194
culi wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think TypeScript can feel like there's too many gaps because not enough people take it seriously enough to truly learn it. Hardly anyone reads a book about best practices/design the way many do about C/Java/Rust. It's actually a very powerful tool when used thoughtfully. Although it wasn't the first structurally typed language I tried, it's the one that made me fall in love with structural type systems

I like the strutural typing as well. But I hesitate to use TypeScript because AI tells me this: It Catches: Mismatched function arguments, missing object properties, and typos in variable names. It Misses: Invalid JSON from an API, unexpected database outputs, and bad user input.

You use Zod if you want runtime features. I'd say it's pretty industry standard. On the type level there's no reason it couldn't account for any of the examples you pointed out. And since Zod supports all the expressiveness of the actual language, you can certainly have those as runtime checks

I would also just like to point out that the "It Misses" your robot pointed out aren't actually flaws with TypeScript but flaws with JavaScript.

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

#218

Post by h14h »

keithnz wrote: post #74

seems ironic that critics were saying, it needs typing, and all the elixir fans were saying you don't need typing, you don't get bugs related to typing because elixir is somehow magic, now they get typing and it finds bugs for them.... but you said you didn't need that to prevent bugs? But good to see! I spent a bunch of time trying out Elixir a while back, I enjoyed it, but just didn't agree with the lack of types.

I don't think anyone serious in the Elixir community ever said "you don't get bugs". Maybe you do get fewer bugs as a result of immutability and pattern matching features, but "no bugs" is definitely not a promise I've ever heard.

The thing you DO hear a lot, though, is that you don't need to worry about bugs nearly as much as you do in other languages. But that's not because Elixir is "magic", rather, it comes from Elixir's runtime (Erlang/BEAM) providing best-in-class fault tolerance primitives like lightweight process isolation and supervision trees.

In practice that means the blast radius of bugs is generally tiny and any resulting crashed processes are often recoverable. The phrase you often hear is "let it crash", since the effort that goes into exhaustive defensive programming is usually more costly than the bugs you'd be trying to prevent.

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

#219

Post by truncate »

Gimpei wrote: post #205
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.

Types are useful for squeezing more performance.
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