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Comment by thdxr | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Elixir for five years and I think it's sorely missing a better type system. I've done fine without it and have gotten entirely used to it but that doesn't mean things wouldn't be better with one.

I only really started noticing as I started to build more complex Typescript systems how much it helps. My teammate shipped a bug in Elixir yesterday that would have been caught by a static type checker

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I know there's plenty of people working with Elixir (and Erlang) that feel that way. I can also imagine that in very large codebases dialyser might not be enough and it would be great to have it. Also that obviously, outside web and telecom there's definitively software which I wouldn't want written in them, but not in TS either, and probably it would have more tests than code, property and fuzzy and all the remaining things.

I also won't say that it doesn't happen but I do believe if the same effort that goes into writing typed typescript and tests, aka, using dialyser and writing tests, that there shouldn't really be any difference? And when you include things like guards, explicit pattern matching, casting your data at the entry points of your system that it provides a much more robust experience?

But that's all optional - what I've seen is that theoretically there's nothing you can't express with the base syntax (+ecto) that you could with most (as in the common ones) type systems, perhaps the difference is that since in a typed language it won't compile you are forced to do those things, define all enums, all their variants, exhaustively match, etc?

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