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You're right that the major downside I can see is the ecosystem is not as big. But when I jumped into Rails over a decade ago, the Ruby/Rails ecosystem was not
by everdev 8y ago
You're right that the major downside I can see is the ecosystem is not as big. But when I jumped into Rails over a decade ago, the Ruby/Rails ecosystem was not huge yet either.
But, static typing and being able to compile and deploy a binary is a pretty sweet developer experience. And the syntax is nearly identical to Ruby with a few nice additions. Many companies like ThoughtBot (a huge Ruby adopter) are jumping into Crystal. The future is definitely in compiled/static languages IMO.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- nasmorn 8y agoIf you mean your future, you could certainly be right. But if you mean the future of all programming I would like to say that compiled/static languages are in fact the past. They are super useful and given a complicated enough problem/ sophisticated enough programmer they will look like a good enough solution for all problems. But ... Wordpress
- handbanana 8y agoWhy are they a thing of the past?
- nasmorn 8y agoBecause in the past they dominated everything. This will not happen again. For some problems/people the ease of dynamic languages are simply more important than the correctness/speed issues you deem as paramount. I don’t mean no one will or should use static languages but believing they will once again dominate like in the 80s and 90s is an illusion imo
- temporaryacc62 8y agoIf only there were types in Elixir to get rid of those damn nulls... Supposedly someone is making a Typescript-like precompiler for Elixir (with ML syntax of course). We are all hoping it succeeds!
- OvermindDL1 8y agoEh, as far as I know I'm the only one doing that, and even then only as an experiment/playground, and I don't have the time to work on it lately (have to pay the bills after all). It's not compiling to elixir, but the `alpaca` language compiles to the BEAM (via erlang core I think) so it gets you close, although they are not black boxing messages sadly. If you know of someone else doing typing experiments on top of elixir, please link me (my playground code is on my github repo somewhere)!!!
- temporaryacc62 8y agoFound it https://github.com/wende/elchemy https://github.com/wende/elchemy The idea seems just like Typescript, a very interesting project!
- OvermindDL1 8y agoOh yes! Elchemy! How'd I forget about that one (I keep pushing it around!)! ^.^; It is based on Elm so it has a severely limited type system but it is the most complete on Elixir so far. :-)
- MitjaBezensek 8y agoThis is probably my only gripe with it. I really like static types, since the tools can be so much better in that case. VSCode + ElixirLS is ok, but far from Elm, Typescript or C# in that regard. I've been trying out Dialyzer and Credo, but it all seems so clunky to use.