Have split this from the recent Ecto announcement where I think the quote below warrants some thought 
What/how do you think the Elixir ecosystem could be advanced? 
Anyone else excited by this? 
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Elixir Devise perhaps? 
Iām very excited!
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Some mistakes should be committed just once. 
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Unless they are idempotent.
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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.
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I absolutely agree that dialyzer needs some love. I for one donāt 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 itās hard as hell but in any case, I believe itās one pain point that needs addressed. Whether itās 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:
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Standardizing Elixirās configuration ā compile-time, boot-time and run-time ā is something thatās sorely needed to improve Elixirās deployment story.
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Speaking of which, Elixirās deployment with Distillery could benefit from less WTH experience ā thereās a bunch of stuff to setup if you want to deploy to your own VPS and itās easy to get it wrong. I am betting $20 that it will take me more than 15 minutes even if we donāt count the time to install everything needed on a VPS / droplet.
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Easier debugging?
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What is hard in debugging?
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Some mistakes should be committed just once.
Iād be interested in reading more about āDevise was a mistakeā (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 JakeBeckerās 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 (JosĆ©ās ElixirConf speech https://youtu.be/suOzNeMJXl0?t=2563) so Iām hoping at this point something like a https://github.com/josefs/Gradualizer approach will eventually advance the state of typing in the ecosystem.
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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 Iād love to complete it but I just donāt have the time (maybe someone else can get it going? ^.^).
Shameless self promotion, but Iām doing my part. Rendering Phoenix templates 12x faster (usual disclaimers apply: This is probably true for highly dynamic templates; my implementation is not yet complete, etc.)
Bonus: these new templates make it much easier to send diffs over the network for things like Drab, LiveView, etc.
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I agree that one of the best ways to improve Elixir is to improve Erlang/OTP. There are many areas of OTP in particular that are unpolished/in need of some love. One area that is still not-as-good-as-it-could-be is the lack of Common Test integration with Elixir. Not that Common Test makes any of this easy to do, of course (itās not designed very well to play nicely with anything other than Erlang/OTP; for example _SUITE.erl is literally hard-coded in a few places).
In general, I think there are people within the Erlang community who wouldnāt mind moving into the Elixir ecosystem, but have a hard time because they have to give up some of the tooling and frameworks theyāre accustomed to using to do their work. Common Test is one of those areas where I donāt feel like we have an equivalent available in Elixir.
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I have really enjoyed using ExUnit, can you talk a little about what Common Test offers that ExUnit does not?
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Thatās true, but donāt forget you can often leverage Elixir macros for dramatic performance improvements (like what I do above).
Iād throw out there additional support for Elixir LS and editor integrations. I recently explored using Elixir/Erlang debugger support and, while the tools are nifty on their own, it would be amazing if it could be integrated into something like Visual Studio Code. If it was turnkey to setup sane defaults for an Elixir plugin for VS Code, Atom, Sublime, etc. I think that would be helpful for a lot of new developers:
- Dialyzer support
- Auto-detect and offer to insert type specs?
- ExUnit integration
- Better autocompletion and language snippets
- Debugger integration (I suspect this is both rewarding and very complex)
- Exposing powerful existing tools like
:observeror:debugger(how many newcomers know about those tools out of the box?)
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Apologies if Iām misunderstanding you, but donāt you already get get Dialyzer support (problems tab, as well as in-editor) + suggested specs in VSCode.
Autocomplete and language snippets are a bit iffy sometimes, but for the most part they seem on par with what Iām used to in other editors. Definitely would love improvements there.
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Iām interested! Iāve tried to read up on various systems of type inference but I really struggle to understand the theory. If you have the beginnings of something written in Elixir, Iād be very interested in seeing the code.
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I have a few playground projects made, none are ācompleteā by an stretch but playing with ideas as I get time (Iāve been out of time lately as well) such as TypedElixir and MLElixir among some others.
