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I wouldn't say it's blasphemy, but I don't really understand the argument about how this relates to 'the application crashing and causing downtime'.

I don't have your level of experience with the language, but I have a personal project written in Elixir, and I do not feel very confident about parts of it that don't have complete test coverage, due to the lack of static typing.

I'm talking about things like: Is this pattern match exhaustive or is there a possible permutation I forgot / specified wrongly, which may then cause a match error at runtime, breaking a particular feature? (of course not bringing down the whole app due to OTP!); or if I change some keys in a map / struct in refactoring, did I forget to change them somewhere else in the application, introducing another error that is only caught at runtime?

Both of these have happened to me, I can even give you examples from code that is not my own – for my project I use a snapshot testing library by an experienced Elixir developer, and while using it I encountered two runtime crashes due to data being in the wrong shape and failing a (function clause) pattern match:

https://github.com/zachallaun/mneme/issues/85

https://github.com/zachallaun/mneme/issues/105

Proper static typing would make it very hard to write bugs like this. In Gleam for example, the compiler checks the exhaustiveness of your pattern matches against the type of the data you're matching against, and forces you to handle all possible values.

by williamdclt5 hours ago|

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> people used to write server software in compiled languages feel the need for them because any runtime bug means downtime

I keep hearing that but I don't think it's been true in many years? Whether it's Go, Java, C#, Rust... a runtime bug will only fail the request, not the whole server.

FWIW, the main reason I like types isn't for the compile-time guarantees (although they're certainly nice). It's for documenting what are the data types I'm working with rather than having to guess them from the code, it's for knowing that something is a square hole therefore I should put a square piece in.

by kamma44342 hours ago|

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That’s my top issue with Clojure: I see what the function does, but is it expecting a list, a string, either, or a map? The function may apply correctly, but what was it supposed to do? Java may be boring, but it’s surprise-free. In Elixir this is less of an issue because of pattern matching and very clear errors showing the actual arguments passes, that are unbeatable for debugging - you look at the log and can “see” the issue.

by ken-kost8 hours ago|

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very true; & 4 years for this niche feature, I feel like it was built for hacker news people.

But that's good! Indeed that was the most needed!

& magnificently executed - that's the craziest part - takes away nothing. The compiler is faster!! It's awe inspiring to say the least, what Jose did and still does.