I find that if most of my logic is relatively gluey, then the fields in my API boundaries are heavily optional, at which point types add a lot less than they do when most of my logic is more internal, and in cases where what I'm doing is just getting some JSON and doing something with it, I'd rather just have the dynamic shape of the JSON in a lot of cases than have to declare an entire schema/codec.

We have so much boilerplate and tooling to share request/response types between services and it's just... heavy. The same feeling arises when I'm sitting here trying to share a shape between a web app and the backend service, where FINALLY I just want the types to get out of my way instead of having to go through all this ceremony.

And my domain is relatively precise and typeable - streaming video with a deterministic set of parameters.

Generally though I'm more likely to agree with the value of types than to undersell them; I just can't find a ways to describe the above experiences such that they reflect that perspective.

I think it's not that I don't want types, it's that I want simple types that play slightly more dynamically - maps of <string, heterogeneous values>, for example, and reasonable means of interacting with them (like various "safe traversal" operators that some languages have added).

Yes; my only critique is that Elixir is already a niche. You could argue it two ways:

1. A niche within a niche is a bad idea 2. If you're going niche, going further niche hardly makes a difference

I think they're pretty different, but there are some places where you can compare them:

1. Hiring and job market - the JVM is simply more employable

2. Ecosystem - in general you can expect the JVM to have library support for most things you're going to need.

3. Typing - if you like static types, you're probably going to miss that in Elixir/Erlang. They're working on a gradual type system for Elixir that looks quite pragmatic, so I'm excited to see how that works out.

The Elixir side of things has some real advantages, though. Runtimes like the JVM are slowly adding threading paradigms that start to look like how the beam works, if you squint enough. Naturally, Elixir already has that, and already has technologies that work very well with it. Virtual threads on the JVM are a smart effort that will take a long time to be complete and will always have to take backwards-compatibility into account, especially if you're in Java itself.

Phoenix is also IMO a best-in-class web framework. I don't think it's universally applicable, but if any JVM language had something like Phoenix I doubt I'd be considering Elixir nearly as strongly (due to my affection for types). So while the JVM ecosystem is broader, it's not uniformly stronger.

I also think that "domain" is much broader for JVM stuff. The web technologies there feel pretty baroque rather than empowering, but you can still do web on the JVM, and Kotlin or Scala in particular IMO serve better for systems where the bulk of the code is internal business logic. I think that even if I adopted Elixir entirely, I'd probably retain some "second language" for deeper systems.