Sure, the nature of Elixir probably makes it easier but I find little joy in dynamic whack-a-mole and mental gymnastics to infer types instead of fricking actually being able to see them immediately.
I could go commando in TS as well and switch to JS and JSDoc, leaving everything gradually typed and probably be fine but I'd feel terribly sorry for anyone else reading that code afterwards. It'd be especially silly since I can now just infer my auto-generated Postgres zod schemas with little effort. Moreover, a good type system basically eliminates typing-related bugs which you guys apparently still have.
So please, don't over-generalize just because you think you got it figured out.
I feel terribly sorry for people that have to read typescript and work with TS zealots
It sounds like you’re really trying to justify something and that’s great for you. I’m really happy for you. Keep it up. May you soar where no junior dev has dared to soar before. God speed.
And look, I'm first to admit that TS type system isn't perfect (and it can cause some devs to go overboard) but I have read my share of Python scripts that were read-only from the minute they were born.
It sounds like you’re really trying to justify something and that’s great for you. I’m really happy for you. Keep it up. May you soar where no junior dev has dared to soar before. God speed.
atom, binary, boolean, function, list, map, pid, reference, integer, float, and tuple
There are a few others but they are generally special cases of the ones above. Having so few data types tends to make it much more obvious what you’re working with and what operations are available. Additionally, because behavior is completely separate from data it’s infinitely easier to know what you can and can’t do with a given value.
Ruby being dynamic drove me insane at times, but Elixir/Erlang being dynamic has been a boon to productivity and quality of life. I recently had to write some TypeScript and was losing my mind fighting the compiler, even though I knew at runtime everything would be fine. Eventually I slathered enough “any” on to make the burning stop… But! That’s something I haven’t had to do in years, and it was 100% due to type system chicanery and not preventing a bug or making the underlying code more sound.
There are still some occasions where having some static typing would be nice— but they’re pretty rare and often only for things that are extremely critical or expensive to fix. And IMHO even in those cases, Elixir’s clarity and lack of (implicit) state generally make up for it.