How do you deal with lack of types? (I know elixir is adding types but from my understanding it's nothing like e.g. typescript)
I'm thinking about learning elixir but lack of types is kind of a turn off for me.
I'm thinking about learning elixir but lack of types is kind of a turn off for me.
Not GP but I'm using Clojure for both the front-end (ClojureScript) and the "back-end" (server running Clojure), sharing Clojure code between the two.
Clojure is not typed but I use Clojure specs. It's not a type system but it's really nice. You can spec everything, including specc'ing functions: for example you can do stuff like: "while in dev, verify that this function returns indeed a collection that is actually sorted everytime it is called". I'm not saying: "no types + clojure specs" beats types but it exists and it helps to solve some of the things types are useful for.
This sounds interesting. Do I understand correctly, this checks the "spec" at runtime? What happens if a spec fails?
Generally I’d say Elixir’s lack of “hard” static typing is more than made up for what you get from the BEAM VM, OTP, its concurrency model, supervisors etc.
That said if you’re interested in leveraging the platform whilst also programming with types I’d recommend checking out Gleam (https://gleam.run), which I believe uses an HM type system.
Here's a summary of the type system they're exploring for Elixir: https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/main/gradual-set-theoretic-types.h...