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Comment by AlchemistCamp | Hacker News Reader

Static typing is far from a panacea. Don't forget that the rise of Perl and PHP, and then later Ruby and Python was in response to statically typed languages like Java.

There are trade-offs.

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What I want hear on static types vs dynamic is how it plays out on a team of say 30 to 100 people. I love JavaScript when it's just me but I much prefer types when using someone else's code because they provide guidance that otherwise isn't there.

One of the things I like about Guards is that you can enforce/match against types as needed.

Guards are nice, but compared to static typing, they a run time check whereas static typing alerts you to errors at compile time.

Guards are mostly used to do pattern matching, not to specify which types a function accepts, though you can use them as such.

I’m a fan of static types don’t get me wrong, I’m just saying with guards and dialyser it’s 60% of the way there compared to nothing. Also I don’t seem to make to class of errors I do in other languages because 90% of this time passing the wrong thing breaks immediately due to pattern matching.

I agree, I wasn't trying to imply otherwise. It's just that static typing is the first thing that looks like a theoretical trade-off of Elixir based on my experience, and I was curious why it doesn't feel that way in practice.

Structs and pattern matching help quite a bit.

Dialyzer via Dialyxir also helps as well

Don't Perl and PHP both predate Java? By quite a bit in Perl's case.

FWIW: Perl, 1987. PHP & Java, 1995.

The rise in popularity can happen later than the creation of a language, see Python (1991).

In my case I left Java for Ruby for web programming in 2006 because working with Rails was infinitely easier than working with Structs. I didn't even know that Ruby was a programming language before Rails.

To be fair PHP, while still dynamic, has eventually evolved to be (optionally) a strict and strongly typed language.

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