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Considering progress in statically typed languages with regard to programmer ergonomics, does it still make sense to go with dynamic languages?
by zerr 8y ago
Considering progress in statically typed languages with regard to programmer ergonomics, does it still make sense to go with dynamic languages?
- mrdoops 8y agoBetween pattern matching and typespecs you get a lot of the "hey you're doing something wrong" checks at compile time to avoid errors. Definitely not a complete solution; a language like OCaml or F# will be better if you're concerned about type safety. The dynamic typing in Elixir/Erlang is a trade-off for Actor model message passing. You get a state of the art run-time for fault tolerance and concurrency, but the messaging aspect makes typing problem-prone. A co-dependency on a custom type is coupling you want to avoid when sending messages around. You don't want a long running process that knows about Type_v1 sent a message from a newer process messaging with Type_v2. The Aeternity team is building blockchain systems with Erlang for nodes and infrastructure. However since smart-contracts necessitate so much type safety and formal verification - they're designing an ML flavor functional language just for that.