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A comment on Why Elixir? A Rebuttal to Common Misconceptions. Parent comment

Re:Why Elixir? A Rebuttal to Common Misconceptions by bsder on Wednesday July 23, 2025 @06:34PM (#44664740)
One of the problems with strict typing is that it makes it very difficult to hot upgrade a function to a different signature.

Erlang OTP relies on being able to swap to new functions to do upgrades without downtime.

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Re:Why Elixir? A Rebuttal to Common Misconceptions by crabmusket on Wednesday July 23, 2025 @07:08PM (#44664990)
If you're trying to hot swap a function for a version with a different type signature, how was the new code going to run successfully anyway? Unless the type signature changes aren't reflecting the runtime behaviour changes?
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Re:Why Elixir? A Rebuttal to Common Misconceptions by Muromec on Wednesday July 23, 2025 @07:26PM (#44665129)
It's a solved problem in gen server actually. Kinda. You migrate in-memory data and if something doesn't align, it restarts.
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Re:Why Elixir? A Rebuttal to Common Misconceptions by bsder on Wednesday July 23, 2025 @07:47PM (#44665304)
You can have a tag so pattern matching can discriminate. You can have new function parameters. You can append to the end of a data structure.

All of these would nominally be considered a type signature failure.

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