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by _trapexit
996 days ago
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Strong typing would not be an unwelcome addition to the Erlang space but compared to most dynamically typed languages I find Erlang/Elixer to be infinitely more usable. If you aren't using guards and specific type pattern matching you arguably are doing it wrong. And those things give you much of the type info you need while developing. No compile time help but it's a lot better than most other dynamic languages. I've built very large projects in Erlang and didn't find typing a real issue. |
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So I want to put on my consultant/lead engineer hat for this discussion. :-) I've worked for years in Ruby, Lisp, Scheme and other untyped languages, and shipped some fairly large projects.
Any project where you can rightfully say "I've built it" is small enough that dynamic typing can be a pretty pleasant strategy. (I'd miss good auto-completion, though.)
But when I walk onto a project with 5-20 engineers and 5 years of code, dynamic typing typically makes everything slow and painful. "We need to update two major Rails versions and deal with 40 supporting libraries. What's the plan for making sure everything still works? We have OK test coverage, but can we pull half the team for 2 weeks to work through the breakage?"
Or perhaps you reach a scale where you need to onboard a bunch of junior developers or data scientists. Here, static typing helps people get up to speed, it encourages them to refactor aggressively, and it limits breakage caused by miscommunication.
50,000 to 250,000 lines of statically-typed code maintained by a 5 person team with normal turnover can make for a very pleasant project. But in that size range, I really don't enjoy dynamic typing. It's doable, but I can really feel the difference.
I am extremely optimistic that Elixir could support excellent static types. And if it does, I'd definitely consider it for a wider range of projects.