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Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

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Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#101

Post by shaki-dora »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #49
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…

> It is a typed language, so it eliminates typing issues, like 1 + "1" = "11". I mostly agree with your point here, but in this specific example I actually think Perl did the right thing, where 1 + "1" "1" + 1 1 + 1 "1" + "1" are all 2, and 1 . "1" "1" . 1 "1" . "1" 1 . 1 are all 11. Letting you specify the result you want by the function you call basically solves that whole problem.

That's just a "type system by obscurity". Extending it to provide the same sort safety, you'd need specific function for all combinations of types: sum_two_integers(), sum_integer_and_float() etc... Which would be both extremely ugly and a terrible waste of memory.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#102

Post by gregdunn »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #83
steinuil wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It actually has... due to not having any major release in 2 years.

So it's abandoned?

No. It is still being actively developed: https://github.com/elm-lang/core/commits/master / https://github.com/elm-lang/elm-compiler/commits/master

But it's been 14 months since the latest full release.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#103

Post by rboyd »

woolvalley wrote: post #90
s4vi0r wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can…

Because you get all of the problems that you get mentioned in the article. And on top of that javascript land is fad heavy, and whats cool today might not be cool 2 years from now. I personally know of a story where a startup started with datomic and clojure, and it was a bad idea because datomic could not effectively delete things. Eventually they went the standard java and standard cassandra / postgres / redis type…

datomic has both soft delete (retraction) and hard delete (excision).

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#104

Post by wpietri »

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…

By coincidence, I just had breakfast with someone whose company adopted Elm; they made a great case for it. I'm excited to check it out.

But I'd add that popular languages have related problems. Java, Python, and Ruby are all ones I've used in production, and I'd say every one has a big problem pushing the language forward. They all have failed me differently in that regard, and I'd still happily use any of them again in the right circumstances.

The talent situation is interesting as well. With a popular language I can find more people who claim to know the language. But of the people who show up, a lot more of them will not be particularly good. In practice, given the work necessary to get somebody up to speed on our domain, our chosen libraries and frameworks, and our own code base, helping them learn a new language doesn't seem like much on top of that.

The big things that keep me from picking novel languages for long-lived production code are libraries and production considerations. It's such a huge advantage to be able to download a decent library rather than having to code everything from scratch. And I don't want to be the company pushing a language into unknown performance territory. It's noble work, but it can be expensive and introduce a lot of volatility that I really don't need.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#105

Post by rthomas6 »

brightsize wrote: post #99
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What changes do you think Haskell can't keep up with? If you want to approximate the cool things in Haskell with a Python-compatible* language, there's Coconut. In addition to static typing, it offers algebraic data types (how I lived without sum types, I don't know) and pattern matching. * every valid Python program is valid Coconut

"Coconut: Simple, elegant, Pythonic functional programming." http://coconut-lang.org/

Wow, this looks very cool!

Why is this not more popular? Coconut seems like something many people, including me, would want to use for every Python project of sufficient complexity. What's the catch?

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#107

Post by pbiggar »

LeonidasXIV wrote: post #54
pbiggar wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw the same at CircleCI with clojure. People want to use functional langs in real systems - we had a lot of Haskell lovers apply because "close enough". Way easier than hiring rails devs. One of the reasons I'm using OCaml/Elm in my new startup :)

> One of the reasons I'm using OCaml/Elm in my new startup Where do I apply? ;-) (To prove the point: yes, I'm one of those passion people, moving to Denmark to work in OCaml full-time, before working in Clojure full-time. Now someone give me an Idris job, heh!)

Here: http://ellenandpaulsnewstartup.com/careers/ :)

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#108

Post by platz »

rthomas6 wrote: post #105
brightsize wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Coconut: Simple, elegant, Pythonic functional programming." http://coconut-lang.org/

Wow, this looks very cool! Why is this not more popular? Coconut seems like something many people, including me, would want to use for every Python project of sufficient complexity. What's the catch?

You write in a dialect that python programmers do not understand. it is a deviation from the norm. expectations on others that have to read/understand/use your code.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#109

Post by [deleted] »

s4vi0r wrote: post #38
rtfeldman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 can…

[deleted]

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#110

Post by marcosdumay »

onebot wrote: post #62
rtfeldman wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don't you want people that care about your product instead of the technology behind it? I do. Because there may come a time when another technology is a better fit for your product and ultimately your customer's experiences. Then what? Now your not using elm and your team leaves or is disgruntled. I hire on passion for what we are trying to accomplish, not the technology stack.

You don't get that choice. You can't select for people that care about your product, but you can select for people that care about some technology.

And, if it is a good tech that fits your business, why wouldn't you?

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