alt Hacker NewsI find the need for type systems is less important now. and thats me saying this after 15 years of coding in Java, Scala, Kotlin, Typescript.
Now I am using Elixir and incredibly surprised by how little I need static types. They are useful, but less needed now.
Never could believe I would say that. But I'm the most productive I ever been.
I get bugs of course, but they are related to queues lengths, retries, api errors, memory usage, performance, ... Bugs related to incompatible types are rare.
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This isn't a great comparison.
Im not that familiar with elixir, but erlang is hands down the best dynamic language to build systems in. It feels like they made only right decisions. I can only assume that elixir has made improvements on that.
Meanwhile java and kotlin have the least useful types I've encountered in my career. Scala has some pretty powerful stuff, but it's like the c++ of powerful types. The ergonomics aren't great. Finally, typescript has a lot of impressive typing constructs but it really falls down on the runtime side (because javascript).
The real comparison to make would be erlang/elixir vs rust or ocaml.
Scala was a dead end. Kotlin an obsolete workaround. Java though is now awesome, esp if you can ignore Spring. Should be more popular in the tech world.
You probably have built very solid concepts/ideas about what types are in the program and how to name things, so that they make sense, and all other things that lead to a program being useful and easy to read, over the course of those 15 years. The situation might not be the same for more junior devs.
But also Elixir's paradigm is not the same as lets say some PHP slinging or JS. It encourages a stricter functional style, that already makes for better code than what many people produce in languages like JS and PHP, or Python.