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Based on the number of attempts to add static typing to Erlang, I don't see this ever happening. I know the author of Gleam is going full-time working on it, b

Based on the number of attempts to add static typing to Erlang, I don't see this ever happening. I know the author of Gleam is going full-time working on it, but I really know much about it or how it gets around the problems with statically typing message-passing. I'm perfectly happy working in dynamic languages and find Elixir's type hinting to be more than adequate.

wa_throwaway 4y ago
While it's not as robust as static-typing, compile-time type checking for Erlang has come a long way. Eqwalizer works pretty well, though but I may be biased since my employer sponsors the project. 1. https://github.com/WhatsApp/eqwalizer https://github.com/WhatsApp/eqwalizer
59nadir 4y ago
You've been able to write PureScript compiled to Erlang for years. PureScript is a well tested language at this point, and the Erlang compilation works very well. Statically typed message passing is a non-issue in practice and it has been a bad reason for not having it the whole time. I've been using Elixir since 2015 and can confidently say there is no use case I would choose Elixir for over PureScript for the BEAM. In practice my projects are Elixir + PureScript because we can have them interoperate, but there are zero technical reasons to choose Elixir over PureScript for BEAM work. Edit: `dialyzer` and similar tools are unusable for almost all sizes of projects in part because they're badly made, they're too lax and have zero useful abstraction properties. Making a spec generic, for example, is an exercise in futility, whereas an actual type system has no issues with expressing that very basic property. Edit 2: As an upside you also have PureScript for your frontend, so you can just write everything in the same language regardless of how much frontend work you expect to be doing. PureScript has great bindings and a great story around React (it actually fits better since it's a purely functional language, so things like "You can only do effects in `useEffect` actually are enforced and make sense) and also has its own frontend framework in Halogen which is very nice.
hinkley 4y ago
I'd like to see someone tackle a PhD thesis (or ten) on applying formalism to the concept of migrations. I suspect there's a missing aspect of type/group/category theory that's at least as big and important as variance is. I think it might already mostly exist, it just isn't organized into a discipline.

wa_throwaway 4y ago

While it's not as robust as static-typing, compile-time type checking for Erlang has come a long way. Eqwalizer works pretty well, though but I may be biased since my employer sponsors the project. 1. https://github.com/WhatsApp/eqwalizer https://github.com/WhatsApp/eqwalizer

59nadir 4y ago

You've been able to write PureScript compiled to Erlang for years. PureScript is a well tested language at this point, and the Erlang compilation works very well. Statically typed message passing is a non-issue in practice and it has been a bad reason for not having it the whole time. I've been using Elixir since 2015 and can confidently say there is no use case I would choose Elixir for over PureScript for the BEAM. In practice my projects are Elixir + PureScript because we can have them interoperate, but there are zero technical reasons to choose Elixir over PureScript for BEAM work. Edit: `dialyzer` and similar tools are unusable for almost all sizes of projects in part because they're badly made, they're too lax and have zero useful abstraction properties. Making a spec generic, for example, is an exercise in futility, whereas an actual type system has no issues with expressing that very basic property. Edit 2: As an upside you also have PureScript for your frontend, so you can just write everything in the same language regardless of how much frontend work you expect to be doing. PureScript has great bindings and a great story around React (it actually fits better since it's a purely functional language, so things like "You can only do effects in `useEffect` actually are enforced and make sense) and also has its own frontend framework in Halogen which is very nice.

hinkley 4y ago

I'd like to see someone tackle a PhD thesis (or ten) on applying formalism to the concept of migrations. I suspect there's a missing aspect of type/group/category theory that's at least as big and important as variance is. I think it might already mostly exist, it just isn't organized into a discipline.