Your thoughts on advancing the Elixir ecosystem

Elixir Devise perhaps?

I’m very excited!

Some mistakes should be committed just once.

Unless they are idempotent.

I think actually a large part of improving elixir can be done via improving erlang. For example, dialyzer has a lot of information about types that if presented properly to the user would be really beneficial. However, since running it is optional its not always done and new users as well as advanced users get tripped up on it and frequently end up not using it. I believe having elixir ship with the dialyzer plt and utilize as much information as makes sense in a more elixir styled presentation of the same information could bring a lot of improvement to the type system that people have been asking for, for some time.

I absolutely agree that dialyzer needs some love. I for one don’t insist on statically typed Erlang / Elixir because that would deprive us of a lot of goodies. But better warning messages and more intuitive way to work with specs is something that will push both languages into the future.

I am pretty sure it’s hard as hell but in any case, I believe it’s one pain point that needs addressed. Whether it’s in 3 months or 3 years, it was a soft-blocker for me and I had to persist a lot to gain a basic understanding and be able to use specs relatively well. And even now parameterizing the specs is something that makes me scratch my head. I might be stupid though.

Additionally:

• Standardizing Elixir’s configuration – compile-time, boot-time and run-time – is something that’s sorely needed to improve Elixir’s deployment story.

• Speaking of which, Elixir’s deployment with Distillery could benefit from less WTH experience – there’s a bunch of stuff to setup if you want to deploy to your own VPS and it’s easy to get it wrong. I am betting $20 that it will take me more than 15 minutes even if we don’t count the time to install everything needed on a VPS / droplet.

Easier debugging?

What is hard in debugging?

Some mistakes should be committed just once.

I’d be interested in reading more about “Devise was a mistake” (reasoning, lessons learned, etc.). Is there anything out there on this? I was unable to find anything (my searches just turn up user issues with errors/validations).

Or it simply a case of introducing a lot of complexity into projects with a simple gem install, i.e. going against the goal of simplicity that e.g. Rich Hickey talks about in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI8tNMsozo0 (such as shortly after 22:00)?

I agree and am pretty sure there has been a lot of recent work committed in dialyxir to get to v1 and present the dialyzer type warnings more understandably in Elixir format. Also JakeBecker’s elixir-ls (by default) runs dialyzer automatically in the background as you work presenting these warnings. So I do think this will be getting a lot better soon.

That said unfortunately an automatic inferred typing system looks to be out of reach for now (José’s ElixirConf speech https://youtu.be/suOzNeMJXl0?t=2563) so I’m hoping at this point something like a GitHub - josefs/Gradualizer: A Gradual type system for Erlang · GitHub approach will eventually advance the state of typing in the ecosystem.

On Elixir proper yes, but there is always the possibility to, for example, do a typed module definition that does the inference using a restricted set of Elixir, I started such an experiment and I’d love to complete it but I just don’t have the time (maybe someone else can get it going? ^.^).