Integrating Elm and Phoenix Channels via Elm-Phoenix-socket • Hacker News Board

Re: Integrating Elm and Phoenix Channels via Elm-Phoenix-socket

#21

Post by knewter » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 10:53 PM UTC

hackerboos wrote: post #19

ModernMech wrote: post #18

How come no one (seemingly) uses Elm, despite all the love? I've noticed a lot of quick, drive-by posts in Elm related threads about how great the language is. This thread ("This is a great little webstack!") and today's other front-page elm thread[1] both do this. With such high praise, I would expect the language to be more popular. What's with the disconnect? My hypotheses: 1) There are no unhappy users because un…

I've heard that interpolation with existing JS libs is painful.

This is because in Elm a runtime error is a compiler bug. If you want no runtime errors, interoperating blindly with JavaScript is a great way to fail :-\

Another great thing about the community is a goal of a single great library for every use case, rather than a lot of half-baked competing libraries. So expect there to be a single great modal library. Etc.

Re: Integrating Elm and Phoenix Channels via Elm-Phoenix-socket

#22

Post by sotojuan » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 10:55 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #18

How come no one (seemingly) uses Elm, despite all the love? I've noticed a lot of quick, drive-by posts in Elm related threads about how great the language is. This thread ("This is a great little webstack!") and today's other front-page elm thread[1] both do this. With such high praise, I would expect the language to be more popular. What's with the disconnect? My hypotheses: 1) There are no unhappy users because un…

Like any new language (including Elixir), it's rare in the wild. Elm is also an ML and looks "weird". Give it a few years.

Elixir is getting bigger with Dockyard and Pinterest using it among others, though it has the benefits of running on proven technology, having an "easy" syntax, and Phoenix.

Re: Integrating Elm and Phoenix Channels via Elm-Phoenix-socket

#23

Post by dmix » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 10:57 PM UTC

MrBlue wrote: post #3

Elixir, Phoenix and Elm have absolutely rekindled my love of web application development.

PureScript + learning Erlang/Hakskell rekindled mine :)

I ended up learning Erlang after hearing about Elixir and not being a fan of the Rubyish syntax and immutability comporomise, which has been a very rewarding experience. Haskell even more so. And Purescript has some nice Elm inspired libraries [2].

[1] https://purescript.org

[2] https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=language%3Apuresc...

Re: Integrating Elm and Phoenix Channels via Elm-Phoenix-socket

#24

Post by Keats » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 10:58 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #18

How come no one (seemingly) uses Elm, despite all the love? I've noticed a lot of quick, drive-by posts in Elm related threads about how great the language is. This thread ("This is a great little webstack!") and today's other front-page elm thread[1] both do this. With such high praise, I would expect the language to be more popular. What's with the disconnect? My hypotheses: 1) There are no unhappy users because un…

From my point of view (and I posted the same thing in another thread about Elm https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11667799 and the mailing list post that sums up better https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/elm-discuss/AmxE3qAm...) it's that it still seems driven by a single person.

I understand why but in the meantime I'll use something else and will try it again once it's more open.

Re: Integrating Elm and Phoenix Channels via Elm-Phoenix-socket

#25

Post by spuz » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 10:59 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #18

How come no one (seemingly) uses Elm, despite all the love? I've noticed a lot of quick, drive-by posts in Elm related threads about how great the language is. This thread ("This is a great little webstack!") and today's other front-page elm thread[1] both do this. With such high praise, I would expect the language to be more popular. What's with the disconnect? My hypotheses: 1) There are no unhappy users because un…

Elm is still way too immature. You either end up rewriting a lot of code that might otherwise already exist as a library or you simply cannot use features because they don't exist. If you hang out on the slack channel you'll get an idea of what the language can and cannot do right now. It's also worth remembering that it's a technology that doesn't have the weight of a big company behind it so pace of progress is relatively slow.

I would probably agree with your first 2 hypotheses. However I don't really see any momentum against Elm. Just the opposite in fact. There are other projects that have the same kind of goals such as Purescript or GHCJS but Elm is the one with the momentum.

Re: Integrating Elm and Phoenix Channels via Elm-Phoenix-socket

#26

Post by nilkn » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 10:59 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #18

How come no one (seemingly) uses Elm, despite all the love? I've noticed a lot of quick, drive-by posts in Elm related threads about how great the language is. This thread ("This is a great little webstack!") and today's other front-page elm thread[1] both do this. With such high praise, I would expect the language to be more popular. What's with the disconnect? My hypotheses: 1) There are no unhappy users because un…

Elm is very new in the grand scheme of things and it was considered experimental for quite a while. The recent changes show that its developers are still willing to make big changes. But I do believe it's stabilizing quickly and I wouldn't be surprised to start seeing it used a lot more, though still mostly in smaller hobbyist projects simply because even if it stabilizes it's still so new that you can't expect larger companies to risk anything on it.

Elm is a lot more experimental than Elixir, for instance. Elixir is still built on the classic Erlang BEAM virtual machine. And its syntax is fairly similar to that of Ruby, which is an immensely popular language among web developers. Elm looks like Haskell, though, which very few developers are competent with. It was originally based on FRP, which has long been considered highly speculative and theoretical. But I think by shedding FRP it's growing into a very practical language, and while it has a Haskell-lite syntax, it's considerably easier to use than Haskell.

Re: Integrating Elm and Phoenix Channels via Elm-Phoenix-socket

#27

Post by im_down_w_otp » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 11:02 PM UTC

knewter wrote: post #17

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at Dialyzer and http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/typespecs-and-behavio... Also, Elixir community... there seems to be a paucity of awareness of Dialyzer and Typespecs. Perhaps they could be more prominent? They're included in the reference docs, but not really so much in a way that indicates what they are or how one would use them when writing their own software in Elixir. There are many, many classes of p…

The latest Erlang release fixed the Map problem with Dialyzer. It was entirely the reason I was lax with specs. I'd love to get a workflow more like this one: https://medium.com/@barruumrex/seeking-simple-satisfaction-2...

For the uninitiated...

Erlang 19's included Dialyzer improves the scenario of type-checking maps in useful ways. Namely that now you can represent an empty map, an arbitrary map of any type, and a partially arbitrary map which must include certain key type and value type associations but is not limited to those. Which leaves out one representation which is a map which includes and only includes a specific set of key type and value type associations.

Erlang 18's Dialyzer has basically just #{} =:= map() which is equivalent to the union of #{none() => none()} and #{any() => any()}, so it was basically a giant escape hatch in the type-checking system, and thus not particularly valuable.

Looking forward to a pending change in laxness as a result of the coming changes in 19. :-)

Re: Integrating Elm and Phoenix Channels via Elm-Phoenix-socket

#28

Post by knewter » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 11:04 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #23

MrBlue wrote: post #3

Elixir, Phoenix and Elm have absolutely rekindled my love of web application development.

PureScript + learning Erlang/Hakskell rekindled mine :) I ended up learning Erlang after hearing about Elixir and not being a fan of the Rubyish syntax and immutability comporomise, which has been a very rewarding experience. Haskell even more so. And Purescript has some nice Elm inspired libraries [2]. [1] https://purescript.org [2] https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=language%3Apuresc...

pedant mode on...

there is no "immutability compromise" in Elixir. Static Single Assignment != Immutability. Elixir is entirely immutable - it has to be as it just runs on the Erlang VM!

I think a legitimate complaint along these lines would be "pinning is confusing and error prone for beginners" and I think it's fair. Christopher Meiklejohn mentioned this on Twitter yesterday, and it's a point that's caught me plenty and I write more Elixir code than most people by far.

Re: Integrating Elm and Phoenix Channels via Elm-Phoenix-socket

#29

Post by akst » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 11:07 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #18

How come no one (seemingly) uses Elm, despite all the love? I've noticed a lot of quick, drive-by posts in Elm related threads about how great the language is. This thread ("This is a great little webstack!") and today's other front-page elm thread[1] both do this. With such high praise, I would expect the language to be more popular. What's with the disconnect? My hypotheses: 1) There are no unhappy users because un…

Coming from Haskell, I kind of dismissed it on the basis of missing a construct like interfaces/protocols/traits/type-classes, and started checking out purescript instead which is closer to Haskell. Eventually stopped using purescript due to some unbearable compile times (in purescript's defence it was early on in it's development, and it's still pre 1.0).

All that said, I'd probably check out elm now only because I've heard good things about it's developer experience.

Re: Integrating Elm and Phoenix Channels via Elm-Phoenix-socket

#30

Post by ModernMech » Mon, Jun 06, 2016, 11:09 PM UTC

spuz wrote: post #25

ModernMech wrote: post #18

How come no one (seemingly) uses Elm, despite all the love? I've noticed a lot of quick, drive-by posts in Elm related threads about how great the language is. This thread ("This is a great little webstack!") and today's other front-page elm thread[1] both do this. With such high praise, I would expect the language to be more popular. What's with the disconnect? My hypotheses: 1) There are no unhappy users because un…

Elm is still way too immature. You either end up rewriting a lot of code that might otherwise already exist as a library or you simply cannot use features because they don't exist. If you hang out on the slack channel you'll get an idea of what the language can and cannot do right now. It's also worth remembering that it's a technology that doesn't have the weight of a big company behind it so pace of progress is rel…

Thanks for the idea to look in on the Slack channel; I had no idea there was one.

>However I don't really see any momentum against Elm. Just the opposite in fact.

I just edited my comment to reflect that by "momentum against Elm" I meant to suggest that Elm is fighting against momentum that is currently behind technologies like JS, angular, react, etc. in the web programming community.