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I was a big Rails, Ruby and dynamic typing fanboy. But then my project grew in size and I changed my beliefs.

I'd not start a big project in any language without: null-safety, proper sum-types, type inference.

Hence I like Kotlin, and KTor seems to be a good Sinatra/Flask like in that arena.

Another interesting development I find no-code/low-code tools for the backend, like Hasura. This allows me to "just expose Postgres over GraphQL" with very little code (mainly configuration). That combined with type-safe client library generation for a typesafe frontend language like Elm gives me all the power I need in a very different paradigm. Something worth considering.

Small example Hasura+Elm project: https://github.com/cies/low-code-backend-dockered



> I'd not start a big project in any language without: null-safety, proper sum-types, type inference.

very interesting; I've been looking into sum-types recently, esp from a categortical perspective https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LJC-XD5Ffo

Maybe there is something about the necessity of Natural Transformation somewhere when the system scales to a certain size


I love Bartosz Milewski! Great talks to make cat theory understandable.

Sum-types to me are just a necessity for expressing certain situations that occur a lot. Enums do not cut it, and making sum-types from records is just ugly, waaaay to much boiler plate and hard to deal with in practice (one needs sum-types AND switch expressions + pattern matching to really unlock the bliss of sum-types).




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