aochagavia
Adapting to Elixir, coming from C# and Typescript
Two months ago I started working professionally on an Elixir project. I had no previous Elixir experience, but I am picking it up at a reasonable pace (previous experience with Rust, Haskell and non-blocking programming in general have proved very useful). One of the things that I find myself missing is the top-notch IDE support I used to have in C# and Typescript, which gave me an incredible productivity boost and made it possible to find my way in new codebases very quickly. Unfortunately, IDE support for Elixir is quite basic at the moment, and my productivity suffers from it (though the fact that I am still learning the language also accounts for the productivity hit). Did anyone here have to adapt to Elixir coming from statically typed languages with great IDE support? How did you adapt?
Some concrete things that boost my productivity as a programmer, which I find myself missing, are:
- Find all usages of functions, modules, struct fields, etc.
- Rename functions, modules, struct fields, etc and have their usages automatically updated.
- A strict compiler that catches type errors, enabling things like “type-error driven development”, where you change something and chase the compiler errors until everything is fixed (it is almost magical to fix all errors and see that the change you introduced “just works”!).
Without these features, I notice that I am much less confident about changing existing code, which I find problematic, because frequent refactoring is often necessary to keep a codebase healthy. Writing new code is not a problem, though.
For the time being, I am using plain textual search a lot (which doesn’t really cut it given the size of the codebase, but I know of nothing better at the moment), using @spec wherever it makes sense (it is not as nice as proper types, but it helps a bit) and writing tests to ensure everything is working properly (ExUnit is great).
By the way, I understand that many of these features are incredibly complex or even impossible to have in a language such as Elixir, so it is probably not a matter of waiting until the tooling gets better. That is why I am looking for ways to adapt my workflow as a programmer, since I assume I am not the first one to stumble upon these obstacles.
I’m looking forward to your suggestions and insights!
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asianfilm
Consider writing your core business logic in Gleam because Elixir is not (and is likely never) going to give you the type-driven development experience of Haskell.
I have a modern 50,000 line Elixir codebase that uses best practices like Credo, Dialyzer and test suites for its core business logic and it never gives me enough refactoring confidence.
I’m considering moving its core business logic to Gleam, which has a lot of Elm influence, and some new IDE support in its latest release (but that aspect is also still a work-in-progress).
aochagavia
Thanks for your answers! I forgot to mention I am currently using vscode with the ElixirLS and Elixir Test extensions. I assume other IDEs offer a somewhat similar development experience (btw I tried IntelliJ a few months ago, but it didn’t work as smoothly).
Right now it looks like I will need to get used to basic IDE / compiler support and hope the features of the language compensate for that. Some that are already proving very useful are:
- Process as a first class citizen (I really like the idea of putting state in processes rather than objects, because you are forced to think up-front about supervision)
- Easy multi-node programming (I recently had the joy of using a replicated Nebulex cache; with just a few lines of code, everything magically worked, whereas in other language I would have needed to deploy an additional service like Redis)
My hope is that these and other benefits will in the end outweight the limitations caused by lack of static typing (and the great IDE they usually enable). Thanks to @AstonJ for pointing this out!
Now if anyone has any tricks to keep a codebase maintainable, I’d be glad to hear them (maybe there is a cheat sheet somewhere). One trick I am already applying is to use structs for GenServer state, and pattern match on the struct when handling messages, so you get compiler warnings if you try to access non-existent fields and get autocomplete support in the IDE.
wfgilman
For what it’s worth, in Jose’s 10yr talk he speaks about prioritizing the IDE experience to make Elixir more accessible and make the learning process easier. It’s toward the end of the presentation here Celebrating the 10 Years of Elixir | José Valim | ElixirConf EU 2022 - YouTube
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