[hosh]

I'm currently working on a data engineering team, unborking some things on a team where all the original developers of the codebase had left. Up until then, I wrote Ruby for over 10 years, and Elixir for 3. I didn't have an opinion about JS or Typescript before this project.

Typescript does not solve the fundamental problems of JS. I'm not convinced it really solved the issues related to ingesting data from many different data sources. The data quality issues were still there.

If I were rewriting the whole thing, I'd rewrite it with Elixir (of course), if only to have a sane way of handling errors.

[aerhardt]

> I'm not convinced it really solved the issues related to ingesting data from many different data sources

That sounds like external data validation and I don't think a type system can really solve that. Even if you're using C#, Java, Scala, or what-have-you, you're going to have that issue. If that's what you expected from TypeScript, then yea, I can see how you'd be sorely disappointed...

Like many others, the advantage of type systems for me is in how they reduce cognitive load thanks to their explicitness, even in solo projects. I literally have a hard time remembering the types returned by a function I wrote a mere few hours ago... I have come to believe that there are two broad types of dynamic typing programmers: those who don't know better, and those who have a superior working memory, or cognitive ability, such that types hinder them rather than help them.

[hosh]

It is not as if I expected Typescript to be promising for external data validation. I was watching what people say about Typescript, and how people actually use Typescript.

I wrote Ruby with duck-typing for 10 years and it never seemed to be a cognitive load for me. My working memory has been degrading as I age. My Ruby code became increasingly written in a functional style. Maybe it's in how I write? Small functions, minimal (or no) side effects, composed together with names that describe how data is transformed.

Explicating types hinder me. Where it had really started becoming more useful was explicit types in functional programming, such as defining monoids or lattices, or whatever, on those data types. My experience with Typescript and even Crystal is that the static typing only yields a fragment of the benefits without being able to define operators that go with those data types. Even the Just/Maybe monad would have helped with messy external data, since that would explicitly define ambiguous data that can be progressively refined into clean data types.

I'm excited to see the new static typing effort in Elixir. It's theoretical base is a set, which, I think, will work better with how people use Elixir in production. It'll be interesting if the Witchcraft (ML ideas in Elixir) will work with those.

[aerhardt]

I am not an Elixir user but I too am watching the type story develop with a lot of interest. Even something half-decent in the vein of Python types would do it for me.