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travisgriggs05/04/20251 replyview on HN

Have you seen any studies that validate this? I feel this would be the case, but I can’t say I’ve actually seen it work out. Cursor writes better Elixir code for me than it does Kotlin, or at least it anecdotally seems so. I find it confusing.

I remember many years ago an akin experience, talking to John Brant and Don Roberts who had done the original refactoring browser in Smalltalk. Java was on its meteoric rise with tons of effort being dumped into Eclipse. They, and others with them, were eager to port these techniques to eclipse, and the theory was they’d be able to do even more because of they typing. But Brant/Roberts that surprisingly it has been more difficult. Part of the problem was the AST. Java, while typed, had a complex AST (many node types), compared to that of Smalltalk (late/runtime typed) which had a very simple/minimal AST. It was in interesting insight.


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cpursley05/04/2025

No studies other than some serious experimentation on my own. I’m a strong Elixir dev but Cursor and friends are just more productive with Typescript due to the editor type checking cycle and training. Thought Jośe is working on a new MCP project to help: https://github.com/tidewave-ai/tidewave_phoenix