New Adventures for Elm

Post by sriku » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 1:00 PM UTC

agrafix wrote: post #37

jey wrote: post #30

I've been looking at the options for pure-functional languages targeting JS, and it seems that PureScript is superior to Elm from a technical perspective for full-stack webdev. PureScript takes the approach of providing a full Haskell-like language that is "native" to the JS world. It has the features and type system of Haskell, but atop a cleaned up version of Javascript's semantics (e.g. strict evaluation, not lazy…

I'm currently moving from Elm to PureScript. Here's why (from "strong" to "weak"): - Currently Elm has a sad story addressing integration with "native" javascript libraries and Elm is too opinioated in some cases, e.g. you can only use either the built-in 'Elements' or virtual-dom Elements to render frontend. This makes it hard to build modular components (see https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/elm-discuss/65tiR…

Post by bribri » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 5:16 PM UTC

ZenoArrow wrote: post #13

What's the best programming environment for Elm? I know there's a Light Table plugin for Elm, which I think is promising (in some ways they seem like a natural fit, whilst they started separately the direction of both was inspired at least in part by Bret Victor's ideas), but I wonder what other tools are being used to code Elm. https://github.com/rundis/elm-light

Post by agrafix » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 5:37 PM UTC

sriku wrote: post #82

agrafix wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently moving from Elm to PureScript. Here's why (from "strong" to "weak"): - Currently Elm has a sad story addressing integration with "native" javascript libraries and Elm is too opinioated in some cases, e.g. you can only use either the built-in 'Elements' or virtual-dom Elements to render frontend. This makes it hard to build modular components (see https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/elm-discuss/65tiR…

Elm's extensible records are more powerful than even what Evan is willing to encourage. You can use them to implement type classes as well as first class modules, albeit with a bit of extra typing (ahem). They even permit you to have multiple "instances" for the same type if you require that.

Post by tangled_zans » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 7:59 PM UTC

pinealservo wrote: post #75

thedufer wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this context, it stands for MetaLanguage, which is a language family (and was at one point a language itself, I believe). The family includes Ocaml (see the ml there?) and Haskell, among many others.

As a point of possible interest to people who are interested in programming language history, I'm going to elaborate a bit on this topic: The root of this particular family tree is essentially a fusion of the lambda calculus-inspired parts of Algol 60 and Lisp with some new ideas for syntax that were promoted by Peter Landin in his highly influential paper from 1966, "The Next 700 Programming Languages". He called th…

Post by codygman » Wed, Jan 06, 2016, 3:56 AM UTC

thinkpad20 wrote: post #80

arvinsim wrote: post #79

I am a frontend developer and I wanted to learn Haskell for a long time. But I just can't wrap my head around it. Is Elm or Purescript a good way to ease into it? If so, which one is better?

One of the major goals of Elm is being easy to learn, both from a language and a library point of view. PureScript is, for better or worse, no simpler than Haskell as a language, with all of the power of Haskell but its complexity as well. Elm is going to be much more approachable, and has a major focus on readable documentation and simple, straightforward concepts. It takes trade offs in language features in exchang…