There's also Dialyzer (and various IDE integrations) for some level of static type-checking.
elixir people really should learn erlang.
if you ever saw a coffeescript person struggling to do things that are straightforward in js, because they didn't bother to learn js? that's what you're doing now
If you learn the base language, you get more powerful in the descendant language as well
Only you DO use languages that end up as machine code, and the idea of understanding machine code to better utilize something like C isn't outlandish.
No need for extra build tools, FFI with the platform language, additional debugging tools, the urge to create wrapper libraries that feel more idiomatic into the guest language, waiting for the guest language to come up with ways to expose new platform capabilities,...
Guest languages are good for experimenting new ideas that eventually get adopted by the platform and then the world moves on, and they turn into the next CoffeeScript.
In erlang these are called "behaviours"
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> I was relying on documentation for that
Consider reading the Erlang documentation. The Elixir people really don't understand Erlang very well, and are trying to manufacture Ruby on top of a language that already gives them solutions to their problems that they just can't see.
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> If there was a way to say use @some_spec and get information about it in the editor. It would have helped out.
Basically every IDE that speaks Erlang knows behaviors. They're as fundamental to the language as header files are to C/C++.
Elixir tried to "do away with them" because Elixir thinks they're "confusing" but they're actually really important tools.
That's completely inaccurate. They are an important part of Elixir and they are fully documented.
Elixir even has annotations that allow you to say "this function maps to a behaviour's callback". For example:
@behaviour GenServer
@impl true
def handle_info(msg, state)
So we do support behaviours and we have added more static guarantees compared to what you would find in Erlang.
> The Elixir people really don't understand Erlang very well
It is a bit depressing it has come to this but my long list of contributions to Erlang/OTP through pull requests, discussions, EEPs, etc say otherwise.
Including Joe Armstrong himself... https://joearms.github.io/published/2013-05-31-a-week-with-e... ^_^
You don’t have to go to Erlang documentation to learn about them since they are documented in Elixir as well [1] [2].
[1] https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/typespecs-and-behavi... [2] https://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/typespecs-and-behavi...
As soon as I add @behaviour to a module, I get IDE autocomplete and compiler warnings if a function has not been implemented.
I do agree that I have not seen a lot of behaviour use in the wild, even in cases where it's clear that they would be beneficial. Elixir developers seem to have some blindspots.
It is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for mentioning it.
Yes. In typescript, you can have abstract classes or interfaces to implement which gives you more information (intellisense, visible errors, type information) and make the contract more explicit. I was trying out phoenix and I didn't get any hints about the methods to implement in the module. I was relying on documentation for that. If there was a way to say use @some_spec and get information about it in the editor. It would have helped out.