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Elixir isn't that old and it'll be interesting to see if it caches on. It's basically Erlang with a nicer syntax and some new ideas.
by ane 11y ago
Elixir isn't that old and it'll be interesting to see if it caches on. It's basically Erlang with a nicer syntax and some new ideas.
- sanderjd 11y agoElixir (and Erlang itself, actually) are definitely the vanguard of dynamically typed languages at the moment. I think this is because they aren't just convenient to write "normal" code in (like Ruby, Python, JS, etc.), they also come with major advantages in writing concurrent and distributed code, which is increasingly important. BEAM is also a particularly good runtime with better performance (especially memory) characteristics than many of its dynamically typed competitors. I think this is the counter-argument to the original claim; new dynamically typed languages can be successful by offering convenience for important functionality. Even so, I think type annotations to aid static analysis (which Elixir has and JS will likely have in the future) will be an important feature. I think the bar has simply been raised for new languages with both static and dynamic type systems. The former can no longer be boilerplate-y, inflexible, and inconvenient, and the latter can no longer be statically uncertain and hard to reason about. This is a good thing.