6 ms·

Very excited to hear about this. Elixir is a fantastic language but tooling lags behind some other options, a type system should help with that.

• weatherlight 3y ago
  > tooling lags behind some other options. Just out of curiosity. What other options?
  • totallywrong 3y ago
    Elixir leverages Erlang/OTP and the BEAM which is basically a whole platform for applications. Probably only the Java / JVM ecosystem is on par.
    • weatherlight 3y ago
      The tooling in the elixir ecosystem is excelent. The only lang/ecosystem that I think does a better job is maybe Rust.
      • dns_snek 3y ago
        I love Elixir, I use it daily, but I have to disagree. Elixir tooling is in my opinion one of the only sore spots of the ecosystem and its quality is seriously lagging behind the vast majority of other languages. When I say "tooling", I'm talking about language servers and overall editor support. As much as I appreciate the work the team has done, I think we have to be honest about the good and bad parts. ElixirLS has never worked quite right for me, or most other Elixir developers I know. It's often painfully slow to respond even in small project, it often gets stuck in obscure failures that require an editor reload to get it fully working again. If you run into any kind of issue with it, the boilerplate response it always: Try running `rm -rf .elixir_ls _build` which sometimes works, but usually not. Javascript, Typescript have immaculate tooling in this regard, same goes for Java, C#, Go, even Python (on IDE side, the package management situation is of course a dumpster fire). I'd go as far as to say that any language supported by Jetbrains has better tooling than Elixir does.
        • weatherlight 3y ago
          https://github.com/elixir-tools https://github.com/elixir-tools Check out next-ls aims to replace ElixirLS. https://www.elixir-tools.dev/next-ls/ https://www.elixir-tools.dev/next-ls/ There's a podcast/interview from its creator below. https://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/153 https://podcast.thinkingelixir.com/153
        • losvedir 3y ago
          I use VSCode at work on our Elixir codebases so I feel your pain trying to get ElixirLS working, though when it does work it's pretty good. However, on my personal laptop I've been trying out the Zed editor which has Elixir language server capabilities out of the box (not a user installed plugin) and haven't had any issues at all.
          • sk0g 3y ago
            Haven't heard of Zed before, feels pretty snappy! Will try it out some more on other projects, though I can't tell how to set it up with PyEnv packages off the bat.
          • dns_snek 3y ago
            > Zed editor macOS only, closed source, and VC funded :( I don't work on a Mac, so it's a non-starter for me, but I'd be very reluctant to switch my workflow to an early stage VC funded product because I don't like having my rug pulled.
        • pdimitar 3y ago
          > It's often painfully slow to respond even in small project I had that problem with NeoVim's Mason plugin that manages language servers, then I just cloned `elixir-ls` and made a super small script to update it daily from GitHub and recompile it. I use that in NeoVim instead and it works near-instantly. Give it a try. I don't disagree that IDE support can look subpar but I'd also venture a guess that proper IDE support is very first-world problem. You won't find yourself working on projects with millions of lines in Elixir ever, and thus not having e.g. full-blown IDE refactoring has never been a problem for me or any other Elixir dev I know. All that being said, literally nothing I have ever saw was able to beat Golang's and OCaml's language servers. They just work and are amazingly fast to boot. It's simply a joy coding in those languages with their LS. Rust is trailing closely behind but it's also a fact that its LS is objectively slower -- still, they seem to have made a lot of strides on that front lately and it's much better compared to even one year ago.
      • answiftydev 3y ago
        The command line tooling is pretty good, the elixirls/ide integration is pretty poor compared to other languages I have worked with. Some trivial examples while learning live view. Using : in pattern matching brings up erlang modules, instead of the atom I used elsewhere in the file. html.heex and the ~H sigil can’t seem to support both html and elixir syntax intellsense at the same time. I also somehow got def in intellsense to not make a new function but instead autocomplete to def(). Finally, after hearing how great Ecto was I was hoping it could provide some sort of hints based on the names of tables/rows I had provided in the migrations.
      • jcpst 3y ago
        Sorry, can’t agree on that one. I like to play with elixir in my spare time, love the language. There is a ton of great tooling. But I use C# and Rider at work, and the IDE experience is light-years better.
  • ccday 3y ago
    I use IDEA and most typed languages I write (eg Java, Go, Python with annotations) have better support for things like automated refactoring, bug detection via static analysis, etc
    • weatherlight 3y ago
      Dialyzer gets you pretty far, Especially since Elixir is dynamically typed.
      • wofo 3y ago
        After spending 6 months working on an Elixir codebase, and spoiled by languages with proper IDE support, I'd say Dialyzer is nice... But doesn't get even close to what I'm used to. Sometimes the benefits of the BEAM and the OTP outweight these drawbacks, of course, but to me it sucked the joy out of programming (I'm very type oriented when writing and, more importantly, reading code).
        • doctorpangloss 3y ago
          Personally I am most affected by language features that didn’t exist before September, 2021.
          • ljlolel 3y ago
            Are you an AI?
            • reilly3000 3y ago
              Are you?
              • justinjlynn 3y ago
                That face when you realise that it's all Actual Intelligence and it's just some of it has extra steps.