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Comment by mike1o1

3 days ago

There was a large group of folks that left Ruby on Rails for Elixir (even has a similar looking syntax), yet it wasn't on your list of languages to consider. Just curious, was there a particular reason?

24 comments

mike1o1

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raphinou  2 days ago

I should have mentioned in the message, but I was looking for a strongly typed language. I was an avid-user of dynamically-typed languages, but that particular Ruby on Rails app became unmaintainable, and part of the culprit was due to the dynamic typing. I hoped that using a statically typed language would make it easier to maintain a complex app in the long term. And I must say that it totally materialised, to the point that I don't want to develop in dynamically typed languages anymore.

Here's an example: as I said in my original message, I was a complete stranger to the dotnet ecosystem, and I learned the F# language at the same time. And I decided to develop the app as a library project to be used by the web app. I completely missed the prevalence of the async approach in the dotnet, and all my code was synchronous. One day, about half-way in the project, I realised I needed to switch to async code. Had this happened in a dynamically typed project, it would have been hell for me. Maybe it's me that can't grasp a project well enough, but I need the type-guardrails to find my way in large refactorings. And with the strong types, large refactorings can be done confidently. They don't replace tests, but make the refactoring process much more smooth.

The app is open source and its code is at: https://gitlab.com/myowndb/myowndb It doesn't have a lot of users, not the least due to lack of marketing and polishing the user experience. But I am satisfied of what I learned developing it!

  • DonaldPShimoda  2 days ago

    This is a really minor point, but "strongly typed" and "statically typed" are not interchangeable terms. In the context of your comments here, you are exclusively interested in the static nature of the type system, rather than anything about the "strength" of it (which is something totally different and inconsistently defined).

  • tasuki  2 days ago

    These days there's Gleam[0], as a strongly typed alternative for the BEAM virtual machine. Of all the languages I haven't used yet, it seems to hit the safe + minimalistic + productive sweet spot the best. (Yes the C-inspired syntax is slightly off-putting, but syntax is the least important aspect of a language.)

    [0]: https://gleam.run/

    • raphinou  2 days ago

      I am also keeping an eye on gleam! I also regret that they left the ml syntax behind, but as you say it shouldn't be a blocking factor. If they adopt computation expressions and make otp a priority it would probably come beside fsharp in my toolbox!

  • asadbeksindar  2 days ago

    Hey, thank you for sharing your app's source code. I'll definitely check it out, I was really looking for such apps on F# open source projects!