Why doesn't Elixir support standard operator overloading?

[dimitarvp]

@binarypaladin

Things like date + 1.days are amazing. The DSLs around dates were just cool. I know there are tradeoffs and such, but sometimes in the Elixir world there’s an immediate mentality that “clarity” is objective. It’s really not. Someone who is not a programmer can read that and grok it.

Used to think so myself (had 6.5y with Rails before I moved to Elixir) but honestly, my day is not ruined for having to write this instead:

NaiveDateTime.add(date, 2, :day)

Also don’t forget that time is very finicky, we still have leap seconds and summer/winter time jumps. There are situations, just in the right two dates of the year, where adding a few hours to a datetime will lead to ambiguous times, e.g. check this out: Timex.AmbiguousDateTime — timex v3.7.13

Having arithmetic operators for something that can jump back or forth beneath your feet I would find suboptimal and unpredictable. I’d prefer patter-matching on the result of a datetime operation, including the ambiguous results.