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Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

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Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#31

Post by api »

mooreds wrote: post #2

My question is, how will he feel about this three years from now? When he is trying to hire someone? Or when the folks behind Elm don't update it as often as they should? The problem with unpopular languages is twofold: * lack of talent that can step right in and be effective * lack of resources to push the language forward The first can be remediated by planning to bring new hires up to speed, and just making that i…

This is correct but sad. It's why better languages like Elm and Rust struggle to gain acceptance while inferior but well marketed efforts like Swift dominate.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#32

Post by always_good »

regularhackerer wrote: post #30
innocentoldguy wrote: post #22

There is so much to love about Elm. It is a typed language, so it eliminates typing issues, like 1 + "1" = "11". Its compiler is great. The compiler catches almost everything and offers easy-to-read suggestions to fix your code when there is a problem. Elm's compiler virtually eliminates runtime errors; at least I've never had a runtime error with Elm. I also like the debugger. It allows you to easily capture your st…

Async only interop to JS is a bit sad though

Though there's the weakly documented escape hatch of writing native modules.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#33

Post by rtfeldman »

mooreds wrote: post #2

My question is, how will he feel about this three years from now? When he is trying to hire someone? Or when the folks behind Elm don't update it as often as they should? The problem with unpopular languages is twofold: * lack of talent that can step right in and be effective * lack of resources to push the language forward The first can be remediated by planning to bring new hires up to speed, and just making that i…

Worth noting that in our experience, hiring has gotten way easier for us since we became an Elm shop. We really struggled to hire React engineers (who have a zillion positions to choose among - why would they pick ours?), whereas there seem to be a lot more great programmers who want to use Elm than there are companies hiring for Elm positions.

Here's a verbatim quote from a cover letter (one I happened to be reading this morning; we see a lot of similar stories):

> Despite my valiant evangelizing of Elm, my company has decided to embrace React over Elm, so I am looking for opportunities to develop Elm professionally.

Our Head of Talent said she'd never seen an inbound pipeline as strong as ours, and the #1 reason people cite for wanting to apply is Elm. The "Python Paradox"[0] is real!

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#34

Post by Multicomp »

regularhackerer wrote: post #28
_xgw wrote: post #26

> Elm requires that you think through all the edge cases. You must consider and specify what will happen in every case. Wouldn't that be the case with _every_ typed and compiled programming languages (or at least, every typed and compiled programming languages that support pattern matching)?

exhaustive pattern matching

Exactly. That's why I started using F# wherever I can get away from it at work.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#35

Post by rtfeldman »

vages wrote: post #4
mooreds wrote: post #2

My question is, how will he feel about this three years from now? When he is trying to hire someone? Or when the folks behind Elm don't update it as often as they should? The problem with unpopular languages is twofold: * lack of talent that can step right in and be effective * lack of resources to push the language forward The first can be remediated by planning to bring new hires up to speed, and just making that i…

Main backer is the online learning service NoRedInk. The language's creator works there.

This has been true since January 2016. Source: http://blog.noredink.com/post/136615783598/welcome-evan

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#36

Post by _0w8t »

mooreds wrote: post #2

My question is, how will he feel about this three years from now? When he is trying to hire someone? Or when the folks behind Elm don't update it as often as they should? The problem with unpopular languages is twofold: * lack of talent that can step right in and be effective * lack of resources to push the language forward The first can be remediated by planning to bring new hires up to speed, and just making that i…

Yet another problem is that for an unpopular language it is easy for its developers to introduce incompatible changes. If one does not have resources to fix the codebase, it is not much different from the developers abandoning the language.

Elm still at risk of such changes, witness fundamental change to it's event subscription model after 0.16.

Of cause, such incompatible changes may happen even with popular languages. But at least you know that you are not alone and there will be companies that support your version. Like, for example, the case of Python2, still supported and even installed by default on many systems instead of python3.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#37

Post by seanmcdirmid »

johnfn wrote: post #24
klez wrote: post #17

> First, Elm has the natural predictability of a pure functional language; when you write Elm, the compiler forces you to consider every case. I'm a beginner with functional languages, but isn't the type system completely orthogonal to the fact that Elm is a functional language?

> I'm a beginner with functional languages, but isn't the type system completely orthogonal to the fact that Elm is a functional language? You're completely correct, though for whatever reason functional languages almost always have strong type systems.

With the huge exception being Lisp-based languages (closure, scheme, etc....). Heck, Lisp was the first functional language and first one that made full use of dynamic typing.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#38

Post by s4vi0r »

rtfeldman wrote: post #33
mooreds wrote: post #2

My question is, how will he feel about this three years from now? When he is trying to hire someone? Or when the folks behind Elm don't update it as often as they should? The problem with unpopular languages is twofold: * lack of talent that can step right in and be effective * lack of resources to push the language forward The first can be remediated by planning to bring new hires up to speed, and just making that i…

Worth noting that in our experience, hiring has gotten way easier for us since we became an Elm shop. We really struggled to hire React engineers (who have a zillion positions to choose among - why would they pick ours?), whereas there seem to be a lot more great programmers who want to use Elm than there are companies hiring for Elm positions. Here's a verbatim quote from a cover letter (one I happened to be reading…

The communities for languages like Elm are definitely smaller, but they're also "passion languages", if that makes sense. Nobody is learning elm because they've been or feel forced to (like you might with React, eg) or because they needed to maintain a legacy codebase at an old job or something. They're learning it because they're interested/like it, etc. So when it comes time to hire you have a small(er) pool of candidates than a react position might draw but the candidates are going to be people who've played around with Elm and enjoyed it and want to get a job writing Elm.

I'm kinda surprised more companies don't take the risk - its not like these are bad languages, either. There's still a huge chunk people (in terms of absolute number, not portion of total devs of course) out there playing around with languages like Elm or Haskell or a Lisp/Scheme, or OcaML, F#, etc. who'd be super excited to use those languages professionally.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#39

Post by masklinn »

_xgw wrote: post #26

> Elm requires that you think through all the edge cases. You must consider and specify what will happen in every case. Wouldn't that be the case with _every_ typed and compiled programming languages (or at least, every typed and compiled programming languages that support pattern matching)?

Not to the same extent, Elm:

* sum types and exhaustive pattern matching (incidentally, still not the default in GHC in 2018 because reasons[0])

* has only one escape hatch of "Debug.crash", which it strongly recommends not using and which it seems many Elm devs aren't even aware exists (in my avowedly shallow experience)

* and which you use as bottom by hand-rolling pattern matches

* at which point you might as well do it correctly

To the extent that you can require proper handling of everything, I would say that Elm is much stricter than Haskell or OCaml or Rust.

You can be very strict in them, but they don't enforce it to the extent Elm does. At least in my experience.

[0] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/PatternMatchCheck

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#40

Post by masklinn »

seveibar wrote: post #20
klez wrote: post #17

> First, Elm has the natural predictability of a pure functional language; when you write Elm, the compiler forces you to consider every case. I'm a beginner with functional languages, but isn't the type system completely orthogonal to the fact that Elm is a functional language?

> > First, Elm has the natural predictability of a pure functional language; when you write Elm, the compiler forces you to consider every case. > I'm a beginner with functional languages, but isn't the type system completely orthogonal to the fact that Elm is a functional language? Yes. The author probably would be equally satisfied with any robust typed solution (flowtype, typescript). They also say that Elm nicely…

> Yes. The author probably would be equally satisfied with any robust typed solution (flowtype, typescript).

Neither is even remotely as robust — let alone friendly — as Elm's type system.

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