Hacker News Reader

Comment by vasergen | Hacker News Reader

What is not mentioned here, the lack of static typing in elixir. I think for some people it could be no go. That is one major downside for me as well. On the other side, totally agree with the developer experience, really love it. I work profecionally with nodejs/typescript and on my free time looking on other languages, especially functional ones. I tried clojure before, but found the ecosystem in Elixir way better, especially dev tooling. It feels like it all really stick to each other. Another part, because all structured around modules, it is easy to check documentation and find the function you are looking for.

View on HN

I dont' care about static vs dynamic typing but if I could at least typehint function arguments my IDE intellisense and I would be so happy :) Maybe it could even be compiled to guard clauses or something?

Writing specs is tedious and apparently not even encouraged for private functions.

Pattern matching and guards handle that aspect quite well.

I personally don't miss statically typed languages having worked professionally with Java, C++, and Typescript in the past. But if static typing is your cup of tea and you want to run on the BEAM, be sure to check out the Gleam programming language https://gleam.run/

We use the dialyzer and also heavy usage of the @spec function signature annotation on public module functions to work around this. It’s an nice compromise between some defensive safety while still enjoying the readability of the dynamic typing.

Agreed. In my experience, typespecs and dialyzer has caught a bunch of bugs living on rare code paths. If I had neglected to test those code-paths, they might have found their way in production.

And what's liberating is that there can be multiple types (including patterns) for each argument and the return value, and the spec can capture all those details. This combination of specificity and flexibility is unthinkable in most languages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com