I had a chance to see static typing benefits in action and I will always agree they are a bit ahead of the dynamic typing.
That being said, I feel static typing is a bit overrated in web dev and outside of enterprise systems overall. F.ex. when I tried to quickly immerse myself in Elm, I figured that obsessiveness with static typing can make a dev's life very miserable and can basically require doing cartesian product structs for many scenarios -- especially if you have to work with data coming from several API providers and provide API yourself to users whose requirements are periodically changing.
I might be a bit in a fanboy mode here I admit, but the compromises that Erlang / Elixir do seem very adequate -- they do forgo some of the benefits of the static typing in return for a bit more productivity / less friction. Granted, if you are irresponsible then you can easily shoot yourself in the foot with them as well. No magic bullets.
(Conversely, if you apply some discipline -- which is still probably two orders of magnitude less than the discipline you need in C/Cpp -- then Erlang / Elixir's dynamic typing is almost like static typing.)
This isn't a blind hate towards static typing; having exposed myself for educational purposes for limited amounts of time to Elm, Pony, Crystal and just an hour of Haskell -- and having worked with Go professionally for several months -- I am not as impressed as I expected to be. I clearly see the benefits but again, I feel they are a bit overrated. A language with a reasonable compromise between type safety and programmer productivity seems to be my cup of tea. And I am not claiming that this "reasonable compromise" -- which is a very subjective term -- is an universal truth. Not at all.
Lastly, Elixir's macro system is not hugely powerful (at least compared to what I know about Clojure) but has served all semi-arcane tasks I tried -- and succeeded -- to achieve with it. But that's of course very specific to one's work and it too can't be claimed as an absolute truth.
Not willing to derail here. Your mention of Haskell triggered a few associations. Apologies if the comment is out of place / topic.
I had a chance to see static typing benefits in action and I will always agree they are a bit ahead of the dynamic typing.
That being said, I feel static typing is a bit overrated in web dev and outside of enterprise systems overall. F.ex. when I tried to quickly immerse myself in Elm, I figured that obsessiveness with static typing can make a dev's life very miserable and can basically require doing cartesian product structs for many scenarios -- especially if you have to work with data coming from several API providers and provide API yourself to users whose requirements are periodically changing.
I might be a bit in a fanboy mode here I admit, but the compromises that Erlang / Elixir do seem very adequate -- they do forgo some of the benefits of the static typing in return for a bit more productivity / less friction. Granted, if you are irresponsible then you can easily shoot yourself in the foot with them as well. No magic bullets.
(Conversely, if you apply some discipline -- which is still probably two orders of magnitude less than the discipline you need in C/Cpp -- then Erlang / Elixir's dynamic typing is almost like static typing.)
This isn't a blind hate towards static typing; having exposed myself for educational purposes for limited amounts of time to Elm, Pony, Crystal and just an hour of Haskell -- and having worked with Go professionally for several months -- I am not as impressed as I expected to be. I clearly see the benefits but again, I feel they are a bit overrated. A language with a reasonable compromise between type safety and programmer productivity seems to be my cup of tea. And I am not claiming that this "reasonable compromise" -- which is a very subjective term -- is an universal truth. Not at all.
Lastly, Elixir's macro system is not hugely powerful (at least compared to what I know about Clojure) but has served all semi-arcane tasks I tried -- and succeeded -- to achieve with it. But that's of course very specific to one's work and it too can't be claimed as an absolute truth.
Not willing to derail here. Your mention of Haskell triggered a few associations. Apologies if the comment is out of place / topic.