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Dave: No, not RPS, not Sorbet. One of these days, I might get around to playing with those. But as a more or less retired person, I’m trying to see what's the best bang for the buck if I want to keep doing hands-on stuff. Maybe I'll check into those, but I'm focusing more on Elixir. I kind of caught the Ruby wave as it crested, rode that to good profitability from about 2009 to fairly recently. If I can do the same thing with Elixir, especially if I can do that on an occasional part-time basis now that I'm retired, I think that would be a win. But I might still keep my hands in on other things.
Dave: Well, I first heard of it through the Ruby community because, as you may recall, it was invented by José Valim, a big name in the Ruby community with all the gems out like Devise and so forth. And it was touted as basically combining the power of functional programming with the concurrency of Erlang with the syntax of Ruby. Now, I think that last bit is a little oversold. It's got syntax that's clearly inspired by Ruby. But the language is so different that to say it's Ruby syntax, that's a bit much. But it is certainly much easier and clearer to understand than Erlang or the other functional languages I've seen.
I took a look at some Haskell; like I said, I never actually learned it, but I have seen some. And I briefly dipped my toes in Scala awhile back, and it seemed like a good thing. And then came the Phoenix web framework drawing heavily on the general concepts of Rails but with the slightly different philosophy of making things more explicit rather than the infamous Rails magic, which is so helpful when you're doing things the Rails way. But if you try to fight it at all, no, no, no, that magic is a plus-five sword against you. [laughter]
Dave: Yes. For about two and a half decades before that, I was doing mostly plain old C, not even C++ except once in a very rare while. And C# had barely been invented. I did do some Pro*C, just basically C with SQL embedded in it and little bits and pieces here and there of Java, JavaScript, Python. At that point, I had learned Perl but not yet used it. I used it for that job and learned that I don't like it. [laughs] And lots and lots of assorted other languages, which is one of the reasons why when Mandy was asking about "Hey, who wants to be on this Podcast called Polyglot?" Hey, that sounds up my alley.
Dave: Only a little bit. For Hacktoberfest, a couple of years ago, I did some minor contributions to...the name was Open Pantry. It's to coordinate basically food banks. And in addition to some trivial typo fixes and such (Those make great Hacktoberfest stuffers.), there were some tests that needed fixing, some stuff that needed tests, and a few other things like that. So I had to delve in there to understand what was going on, how to test it, and the appropriate testing tools, and so forth. But other than that, I have not landed significant work in Elixir yet. Like I said, I've been learning it very slowly. I'll probably port some of my old toy Rails apps over to Phoenix one of these years.
Dave: Only a little bit. For Hacktoberfest, a couple of years ago, I did some minor contributions to...the name was Open Pantry. It's to coordinate basically food banks. And in addition to some trivial typo fixes and such (Those make great Hacktoberfest stuffers.), there were some tests that needed fixing, some stuff that needed tests, and a few other things like that. So I had to delve in there to understand what was going on, how to test it, and the appropriate testing tools, and so forth. But other than that, I have not landed significant work in Elixir yet. Like I said, I've been learning it very slowly. I'll probably port some of my old toy Rails apps over to Phoenix one of these years.
Dave: Not to that level of scale. But I have been working my way through the Elixir track of Exercism. In fact, I had finished the V2 track entirely. Now that they've launched V3, I'm doing the rest of it. And a lot of that I had also done in Ruby. And of course, some of it is fairly standard problems. Like, they've got one called Raindrops, I think it is. It's basically a step above Fizz buzz. And, of course, there are so many, many ways to solve Fizz buzz. But then there's okay, which of these approaches might be appropriate in a functional language as opposed to an object-oriented or imperative language? Even doing it in Ruby, there's not much need for packaging something up into an object, so it may as well be imperative.
Kirk: So this leads me to a question. As you said, the main perspectives of Ruby with regard to that lack of static type checking is you have your tests catch these errors. And one of the things that I found actually converting Ruby code that I've written to Crystal, which is a statically-typed checked compiled language, is that there are cases where I've had Ruby code that has literally been running in production for more than a decade. When I converted it to Crystal, I discovered that I had some fundamental errors in a few places with regard to certain type checking things that didn't come up in any of the specs that I wrote and maybe came up in runtime errors.