I just needed to re post this because 100% this on so many levels.
I’m not even just talking about the type checking here.
If you can’t answer this question before you are sure of your choice on most questions you have,
I’d recommend re asking the question.
But given the post about type systems and the fact it was asked to not make comments in that thread I felt this was worthy of its own post.
Honestly though this! Start with that question every time.
Once I started to force myself to ask this question on most of my issues I felt I was not addressing correctly I found peace in moving past perceived problems that had little impact on my own goals. These questions I imposed on myself often had been the source of frustrations and anxieties.
Who needs this tooling? First of all beginners, this should speed up adoption of the language.
Is this a good thing? I would say yes and no, yes because there will be more elixir jobs and no because the community will degrade and become fragmented like it always happens with popular languages.
Just to be clear I support the type checking system. I also think the work going into this language is top shelf and high quality and the work others have done is worthy of their time.
For me this question was way more abstract than just talking about if the type system was a worthy problem to be solved.
At the root of the question is the question “why”.
The “Why are we doing x, y or z?”
I won’t argue if the type system is a real problem or not because its not really for me to say,
but the fact someone is asking that question gives me confidence we are at least on the right path.
I don’t disagree,
This reposting of this comment was for the general crowd to remember this is the starting point for most of your problems not just working on the type system, but rather all problems should start here.
Not mutually exclusive to the original post this comment came from.
It was because of the greater context this question encapsulated I felt it worthy of reposting.
I can’t count how many times I’ve been frustrated at a job because I felt someone forgot to ask this question.
That’s all I’m saying.
It’s definitely a thing in our industry! I used to work on a team with a few people who questioned things heavily. It was great! One developer would literally question every single feature request that would come through product. “Why are the users asking for this? Is there a way we could solve this problem by doing nothing at all? Would they be able to use an existing feature if we slightly altered it?” This lead us to start doing really quick prototypes so the customers could play around with their idea. Often they actually wouldn’t want the feature once they actually tried it. All parties were much happier.
