Why doesn't Elixir support standard operator overloading?

[binarypaladin]

@josevalim

We don’t have the concept of primitives, as in those languages, but integer and float are built-in types and decimal is a custom one. So there is a clear demarcation here. In any case, if I could, I would support decimal + integer, but we can’t do it today without making it slower for all cases and without breaking guard semantics. The shortest way around this is to have decimal as a native VM type.

Yeah, the reasons have been spelled out well in this thread. I honestly asked because if there is something I have come to expect from this language, it’s that the decisions always seem to have really solid reasoning, even where it doesn’t jive with my personal tastes. I figured from the start there were legit philosophical and technical reasons for it and looking through the mailing lists made that clear enough.

@josevalim

Other than that, I am very glad to not have date + 1.days, because there isn’t anything arithmetic about it. For example, it is not guaranteed that (date + duration) - duration == date. I do like 1.days though, as a mechanism to express durations, but I would be 90% as a happy if we had Date.shift(date, months: 1, days: 10) in Elixir (PRs are welcome, I consider this to be the last calendar feature missing in Elixir).

Yeah. Honestly, I kinda wish I hadn’t even brought that up. It was just me talking about how I like the way Ruby can be written, especially for a non-programmer. I don’t think Elixir would be better for it, but I also think it’s still fine to appreciate what other languages can do. It turned into… a fixation I didn’t intend in the conversation.

I think anyone who has been programming for very long knows how important precision is with dates. We all have horror stories, lol. The system I am working on right now is a real beast if you’re not extremely careful about bloody time zones!

@josevalim

Finally, the hope is that once we have the type system, we will warn if you give a struct to any >, >=, <, and <=. It is pretty much a language pitfall that I hope we can address more reliably.

This was the main thing I came for because that was the bug I hit. No warning. No nothing. And I know why it’s that way.

And hey, since I have you here… I love Elixir! It’s what I use professionally. I was a long time Rubyist (about 12 years) and I made the move. I still miss some bits but there’s no going back. You and your team have done such a good job with both the language and community. I can’t tell you how much it’s improved my work and me as a programmer.

I am continuously humbled by your ability to address even hostile comments with incredible wisdom and humility. I appreciate you taking the time to comment. Seriously.