Comment by anonyfox

Between professional Elixir, Go Rust and Node over decades now I am arriving actually at OCaml now. Using LLMs to actually teach it to me.

Andd boy, a REAL type system is just something i won't ever again compromise upon. I mean yeah I did many years of Ruby/Rails and loved it back then, and Elixir in that regards at least on surface felt strictly better (sweet pattern matching, pipes, ...) but just SO MUCH CODE is written either at runtime or in loads of tests that essentially make up for the lack of a compiler guarantee about type errors i cannot unsee it anymore. Rust is way better here for example for sure, Trait system and all, but here the compile time tax is very real even after fiddling with optimal crate splits. Plus _sometimes_ a bit of simple mutable code just hits home in a few lines instead of often slower pure FP equivalents.

Happy to see that Elixir finally after years in the making is arriving somewhere, but I essentially left the ecosystem now since I really do either TDD (Type driven Development) now or quick solutions with node/go when quality isn't the concern... and now I discover OCaml (with Effects based multicore now) and yes the syntax is _a bit_ alien but damn it checks all boxes of all techstacks I ever wanted. I can write nearly Elixir style code, pattern match pipes and all, I can write (nobody does but I could) failry powerful OOP stuff, compile instantly, in a statically linked binary, with true parallelism, and a type system that is amazing (don't get me started about module functors). Beam is a impressive feat of engineering, but its also moving like molasses and deployment is nontrivial and quite cumbersome to operate (at least people need quite a lot of learning curves until theyre comfortable with this powerful beast). And then there is OCaml. And the tradeoff here is on the human side, nearly no one knows it, learning curve is high, so statistically no team would pick it in most businesses or has experience with it, and that specific situation is personally for me irrelevant now as a solo builder in an LLM age.

Lets see how good this becomes at some point, I am watching and would have loved to have this at least gradual typing available years ago!