Erlang has dialyzer type checker. Depending on how well users refine their types that can produce very good results. Combine that with property checker (PropEr or QuickCheck) + Erlang's default process isolation and fault tolerance, and I think it can make for a more reliable system. I think I'll take that into production over just having a statically typed program. (Just going off my gut feeling and experience).

http://learnyousomeerlang.com/dialyzer

( not sure if Elixir supports it though, but it seems so:

http://elixir-lang.org/docs/stable/Kernel.Typespec.html )

Yeap thanks, have used both.

It's just optional, and therefore doesn't get used much on open source projects. So the average quality of code suffers.

Whereas something like Go where extra import are hard errors, making best-practices mandatory keeps code to certain standard and it's zero work to setup.

Yap, makes sense, I see your point.

Haven't heard of mandatory dialyzer type coverage yet. It would be kind of commit hook of sort, still external to the compiler though...

Ugh. What's most needed is a erlang-platform like haskell-platform.... bring together vital tools (proper/dialyer/etc), have a great package index (like hackage/pypi/rubygems) + package manager and have a skeleton project generator (rails-ish) that sets up what was asked for.

Convention > configuration

The easier it is to get going and contribute, the more people will use it. (Haskell pushed hard on this later on and has really benefited. Node did it early.)