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Comment by phtrivier | Hacker News Reader

As a very frequent nagger about the lack of type system of Elixir, this made my day:

> The type system will extract type information from patterns and guards to find the most obvious mistakes, such as typos in field names or type mismatches from attempting to add an integer to a string, without introducing any user-facing changes to the language.

> By propagating types from structs and their fields throughout the program, we will increase the type system’s ability to find errors while further straining our type system implementation.

Congrats to them.

I still wish it had been implemented 10 years ago, but, hey, that train has sailed a long while ago. (I know, trains dont sail. Or, as we say in Elixir-land, "** (MatchError) ...")

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Elixir got traction as a Ruby on Rails replacement in combination with Phoenix. That was deliberate. The core modules and functions got names identical or close to their Ruby counterparts. It makes sense that they aimed a dynamically typed language to another dynamically typed language. If they aimed at Java developers they would have to add a type system since the beginning. That's extra work though.

I got into Elixir because it is dynamically typed. I wouldn't have considered a statically typed one. Luckily I find enough customers with Ruby and Python. The last Elixir project was from a couple of years ago. I didn't have to use something statically typed since 2012, I think. Too tiring to write.

Folks tend to understate the influence of Erlang and overstate the influence of Ruby on Elixir. In a nutshell: Elixir is dynamic because Erlang is dynamic. :)

Ruby did influence the syntax and the names in the standard library, but the latter was also done in a more "democratic" fashion: I would look into Ruby, JavaScript, Clojure, Haskell, and choose a name that was common and closer reflected the semantics that would fit Elixir (for example, the term "protocol" come from Clojure).

The most curious case is the "Regex" module (which is named Regexp in Ruby). I quickly noticed that both "regex" and "regexp" were very common, Erlang simply used "re", so I had no clear direction to lean towards. The decision came by getting the top 50 languages at the time and using Rosetta Code to pick the most common term (which was regex).

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