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Comment by doawoo | Hacker News Reader

Y’all should really give Erlang/Elixir a try… this stuff is so much more trivial to deal with in that ecosystem and it pains me that it doesn’t get as much attention as Go does.

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They're very different languages and have different deployment dynamics. Elixir is a higher-level language. Other languages are lower-level. People will always be frustrated to see a language "shoehorned" into a higher- or lower- level setting where their preferred language might fit. We're an Elixir/Go/Rust shop. You could not use Rust and Go interchangeably for what we use them for, and you couldn't use Elixir almost anywhere we use Go.

I am curious about Elixir, but I really can't bring myself to spend time mastering a language with dynamic types. You are removing one class of errors from your application, but at the same time inviting a new one that has been solved decades ago.

I'm aware that this is a very controversial take, because lots of people love duck typed languages, but after working in large codebases, they are a hard pass for me. There's a reason why TypeScript was created for JavaScript, Sorbet was created for Ruby, and type hints is so popular with Python. I think I've seen something about gradual typing being introduced in Elixir, but gradual typing is still a long ways from enforcing type safety. Until then, I'll stick with Go.

If I am mistaken and there is a "TypeScript for Elixir", then I would love to know about it.

I've worked with strongly typed languages and duck typed languages. I've also worked a lot with Go and Elixir. In my opinion, the tradeoff between the elegance of Elixir's actor-based functional style vs. Go's warty imperative style is more compelling than static typing vs. duck typing.

I love working with Elixir. Go is something I tolerate.

That's a fair trade if you don't like Go, but I love working with it, so for me it has to be something more compelling than trading safe types for actor-based functional style. Go's imperativeness never bothered me.

Elixir is in the process of adding a gradual type system right now FWIW.

Indeed, I mentioned it in my comment. Thanks.

I agree. Having worked a lot with both, I think Elixir is by far the better language, especially for web programming.

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