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My impression of Elixir and Erlang are that they are the only dynamic languages I'm aware of that seem to have dynamic typing for solid technical reasons. Many
by Buttons840 10y ago
My impression of Elixir and Erlang are that they are the only dynamic languages I'm aware of that seem to have dynamic typing for solid technical reasons. Many languages are dynamic just for user experience reasons. But the way the BEAM VM handles hot code swapping, concurrency, and memory management, etc, required using a dynamic language. (As far as I'm aware?)
- jrobn 10y agoI think it's because of the built-in nature of message passing in the language. It's just easier to send around messages to processes. Hot code swapping would be possible with other JITed languages (BEAM isn't a JIT). Also since erlang has excellent pattern matching (even on binary data!) and a supervisor system (OTP) errors are easy to recover from. Erlang takes a very pragmatic approach of building tools that deal with errors by recovering from them instead of trying to exhaustively trying to prevent them.