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I don't think he ever said such a thing. Do you have the source of this claim? Some back story: "Through the years, there were some attempts to build type sys

I don't think he ever said such a thing. Do you have the source of this claim? Some back story: "Through the years, there were some attempts to build type systems on top of Erlang. One such attempt happened back in 1997, conducted by Simon Marlow, one of the lead developers of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, and Philip Wadler, who worked on Haskell's design and has contributed to the theory behind monads (Read the paper on said type system). Joe Armstrong later commented on the paper: One day Phil phoned me up and announced that a) Erlang needed a type system, b) he had written a small prototype of a type system and c) he had a one year’s sabbatical and was going to write a type system for Erlang and “were we interested?” Answer —“Yes.” Phil Wadler and Simon Marlow worked on a type system for over a year and the results were published in [20]. The results of the project were somewhat disappointing. To start with, only a subset of the language was type-checkable, the major omission being the lack of process types and of type checking inter-process messages." https://learnyousomeerlang.com/types-or-lack-thereof https://learnyousomeerlang.com/types-or-lack-thereof

Twisol 6y ago
And I think that speaks to the current state of type system research on communicating processes, not to any fundamental inability thereof. Session types are a recent approach (though one that I don't think goes far enough; give me full-duplex channels!)
pharmakom 6y ago
sorry I can't remember where I read it. one quote I found: Q: "Erlang is currently a dynamically typed language. Are you saying you would like some static type as optional typing or both, or would you change the nature of Erlang to static typing?" A: "No, I wouldn't change it, but I would like subdomains where it is statically typed. You could actually encapsulate parts in statically typed." So it sounds like he stands by dynamic as the correct choice for Erlang, although not all of the time.

Twisol 6y ago

And I think that speaks to the current state of type system research on communicating processes, not to any fundamental inability thereof. Session types are a recent approach (though one that I don't think goes far enough; give me full-duplex channels!)

pharmakom 6y ago

sorry I can't remember where I read it. one quote I found: Q: "Erlang is currently a dynamically typed language. Are you saying you would like some static type as optional typing or both, or would you change the nature of Erlang to static typing?" A: "No, I wouldn't change it, but I would like subdomains where it is statically typed. You could actually encapsulate parts in statically typed." So it sounds like he stands by dynamic as the correct choice for Erlang, although not all of the time.