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Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

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Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#181

Post by ratboy666 »

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…

1 + "1" => "11" is not the sign of an "untyped" language. I would expect 1 + "1" => 50 (ascii asm), 1 + "1" => 242 (ebcdic asm) or 1 + 1 => 2 (length tagged string, eg, untyped pascal-ish variant), or 1 + "1" => some seemingly random value (C lang) in an "untyped" language.

1 + "1" => "11" is strongly typed, dynamically typed, with a particular type conversion that favours "strings".

But, on reflection, I am probably an pedantic iconoclast.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#182

Post by yawaramin »

woolvalley wrote: post #143
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Java, C and C++ before coming to Python. Unlike theirs, Haskell's type system is complete -- even a function of functions can specify exactly what kinds of functions it uses for inputs and outputs. That makes higher order programming much safer -- and higher-order programming might be the best way to move fast. Haskell is also astoundingly terse. In Java and C my data type declarations were too long to fit on…

That complicated type system w/ type inference does come with it's own costs, usually bad compile speed issues. It's what I've noticed when looking at languages like swift, rust, scala & haskell. I'm currently dealing with it in a large swift project, and I would much rather go back to the extra verbosity of objective-c than have type inference at this point. But that was insightful, thank you!

Check out OCaml (BuckleScript or ReasonML on the frontend, depending on which syntax you prefer). It has a super-fast compiler with almost total global type inference. The Facebook Messenger team report incremental builds of less than a second.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#183

Post by yawaramin »

sidlls wrote: post #179
fjsolwmv wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been the story of Haskell for over 10 years. The world and other language ecosystems are changing faster than Haskell is growing. Clojure and Scala give you an alternative to Python that have the power of the Java ecosystem to take your programming out of academic and toy projects. And Python finally has static typing, 10 years after it was announced.

Python has static typing? Since when? In what form?

Python 3 supports type annotations natively, and the mypy tool is an external typechecker that you can run just like any other static analysis tool during your build.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#185

Post by frfl »

sidlls wrote: post #179
fjsolwmv wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been the story of Haskell for over 10 years. The world and other language ecosystems are changing faster than Haskell is growing. Clojure and Scala give you an alternative to Python that have the power of the Java ecosystem to take your programming out of academic and toy projects. And Python finally has static typing, 10 years after it was announced.

Python has static typing? Since when? In what form?

http://mypy.readthedocs.io/

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#186

Post by rebeccaskinner »

crdoconnor wrote: post #111
kqr wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But are language enthusiasts really better hires in general? I've known many of them who loved the theory and toying with a language but were not any better at producing actual value than the average joe. I think they may be safer hires, anyway. They will be able to program themselves out of a wet cardboard box, which is more than you can say about the average Joe who may just be good at bluffing the interview.

Provided you dangle enough money and have a good interview process you can easily cull those people who can't code themselves out of a wet paper bag. The thing that would worry me about niche languages is the amount of wheel reinvention you'd have to do. Not sure the cost/benefit calculation starts to look so great any more when you realize that your enthused elm developers will have to build a whole lot of stuff tha…

Most niche languages have an FFI escape hatch for when you really need a library and don't want to re-invent a wheel. Elm, Purescript, Bucklescript, and ghcjs can all interoperate with javascript; Scala and Clojure work with most (all?) native java libraries; F# has access to most (all?) .NET libraries. Haskell, Idris, ATS, Erlang, and SBCL Common Lisp all allow you to access native system libraries.

FFIs can have warts, but in the general case library support isn't the obstacle people make it out to be.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#187

Post by quaunaut »

not_kurt_godel wrote: post #168
_d8fd wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just tinker with Elm at work on your lunchbreak and say you uswd it at work. If you're awesome, no one will know and/or care where you picked up your awesomeness.

> say you used it at work Please don't do this. If you're not found out in the interview, you'll be found out on the job eventually due to your obvious lack of experience. Some of my most personally loathed coworkers have been people who have bullshitted their way into positions by claiming skills they don't have or aren't qualified in, making them a nightmare to work with.

Is there some way in which side project experience is different than professional experience no one has ever informed me of?

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#188

Post by Jeff_Brown »

woolvalley wrote: post #178
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you noticed slow compiling with Haskell specifically?

I've only used swift at that size, but I've heard stories with all of those languages once you have a large code base. I remember vaguely reading about how at a haskell conference people were basically cornering compiler maintainers about compile speed, but that was several years ago.

When I have to recompile, it's usually because I've only modified a few files, and it's usually really fast. I particularly enjoy that if I refactor things without actually making any changes in the way it works, GHC won't blink; it knows there's nothing to do.

My codebase is only a few thousand lines, though.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#189

Post by quickthrower2 »

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…

Yes it's the ol' Haskell tax. As a part-time Elm enthusiast that's why I'll probably use it to build my own stuff to opensource/sell, rather than try to get a job doing it, lest my family goes homeless. Hyperbolic, but kind of true! However it's great for the company hiring. They can get solid code at a solid price. I've seen the same with a Haskell/Blockchain job. The company owner admitted in a chat channel that he would have said "Berlin Salary" rather than "Not quite SFO" in the job ad if he had know the response rate he would have got.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#190

Post by quickthrower2 »

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…

Hiring: Elm is quite easy to learn. It's a shaved down Haskell for the language, with a military style strict version of React as the view paradigm. So you just need someone who has done some ML type language or is keen to learn, which is many people. Also see my sister comment about Haskell tax. (The employee pays the tax to the employer!). We really need to get away from this idea of "She's a Java developer", because she isn't. She is a problem solver with programming skills.

Lack of resources could be an issue. I am hopeful about Elm though as the founder has plenty of cash and passion to keep pushing it forwards, plus a full time job doing just that. Plenty of people who can step in if required. The compiler is written in Haskell so is probably quite maintainable. Much of the functionality is in libraries maintained by a diverse group.

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