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For someone completely new to development Dockyard academy course resources [0] are open source and an excellent showcase for livebook.
For an experienced dev wanting to pick up Elixir I would suggest picking up Elixir in Action [1]. The third edition is currently in MEAP. Much more concise and great discussion of some Erlang/OTP internals too.
[0] https://github.com/DockYard-Academy/curriculum
[1] https://www.manning.com/books/elixir-in-action-third-edition
Were you using Typescript with Node? I really can't imagine working on a project that's even moderately complex without static typing. Having a static type checker is like having an assistant that writes automated tests on its own, and having those tests constantly running in the background.
Refactoring code without static type checking is a nightmare. If you're using a strict statically typed ORM like Prisma [1], you can change your data model then run tsc --noEmit --watch in your terminal and the compiler notifies you of every error with their associated file names and line numbers. In VSCode you can even click the line number and it'll open the specific file where the error occurred. Before adopting Typescript, I basically never attempted large refactors, and when I did it consisted of a long process of grepping for specific symbols in the project, and manually writing lots of tedious and verbose tests to do a fraction of what the compiler does automatically.
I remember developers from the Elm community years ago constantly advocating for static typing, and thinking "this has to be hyperbolic". Richard Feldman gave a talk about how he wrote code on an airplane for hours without an internet connection, and without actually running the code, and how the compiler ensured that the code just worked. Typescript is not as sound as a Hindler-Milney type system, but the benefits are similar (especially if you're running Typescript in strict mode).
[1] https://www.prisma.io/
> If I would level criticisms at dialyzer it would be its sometimes difficult to read warnings, it’s speed (despite being multithreaded) and the race conditions in the VS Code plugin (which is looking for extra maintainers – if I had time I would help).
One of the advantages of TypeScript is that VSCode is written in TypeScript, and both VSCode and TypeScript are developed by the same company, so there's a really nice synergy there. I imagine Kotlin users feel the same way using Jetbrains products, and Swift users feel the same way about XCode.
Dialyzer looks interesting, but I can't imagine giving up on the expressiveness of TypeScript. Some of the things you can do with generics, mapped types, intersection types, template literal types, conditional types, and utility types are almost mind boggling. It's difficult to reap all of the benefits of static analysis without some of these advanced type operators. The type manipulation section of the TS manual is really underrated.
Someone for example wrote an SQL parser in TypeScript that requires no runtime code [1]. It can infer the types of an SQL query's result based on an SQL string without any runtime code execution. There was a similar project where someone built a JSON parser entirely using the type system [2]. There's also an ongoing discussion on Github about the the fact that TypeScript's type system appears to be a Turing-complete language with some other cool examples [3]. My point is that the type system is incredibly expressive. You rarely run into an idiom that can't be typed effectively.
[1] https://github.com/codemix/ts-sql
[2] https://twitter.com/buildsghost/status/1301976526603206657
[3] https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/14833
> If I would level criticisms at dialyzer it would be its sometimes difficult to read warnings, it’s speed (despite being multithreaded) and the race conditions in the VS Code plugin (which is looking for extra maintainers – if I had time I would help).
One of the advantages of TypeScript is that VSCode is written in TypeScript, and both VSCode and TypeScript are developed by the same company, so there's a really nice synergy there. I imagine Kotlin users feel the same way using Jetbrains products, and Swift users feel the same way about XCode.
Dialyzer looks interesting, but I can't imagine giving up on the expressiveness of TypeScript. Some of the things you can do with generics, mapped types, intersection types, template literal types, conditional types, and utility types are almost mind boggling. It's difficult to reap all of the benefits of static analysis without some of these advanced type operators. The type manipulation section of the TS manual is really underrated.
Someone for example wrote an SQL parser in TypeScript that requires no runtime code [1]. It can infer the types of an SQL query's result based on an SQL string without any runtime code execution. There was a similar project where someone built a JSON parser entirely using the type system [2]. There's also an ongoing discussion on Github about the the fact that TypeScript's type system appears to be a Turing-complete language with some other cool examples [3]. My point is that the type system is incredibly expressive. You rarely run into an idiom that can't be typed effectively.
[1] https://github.com/codemix/ts-sql
[2] https://twitter.com/buildsghost/status/1301976526603206657
[3] https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/14833
If you're into trying out static typing in Elixir, please check out https://github.com/esl/gradient. It's still experimental, but already functional. We're happy to get any feedback or, better yet, contributions.
for the BF programming language, written entirely using TypeScript type annotations [1].
> There's a lot of prior art described in literature as well as practical programming implementations with much crazier, yet successfully working type inference.
Has any of this been demonstrated in Elixir?
[1] https://github.com/sno2/bf