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Asset minification with Elm (2018)

elm-lang.org

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Re: Asset minification with Elm (2018)

#21

Post by Chadtech_Real »

pictur wrote: post #4

Has anyone started a project with elm and continued it for a long time?

I have been writing Elm for 5 years now. I work at Humio, where our front end is 100k lines of Elm code.

What would you like to know? I love Elm. I'm absolutely hooked. I don't want to go back to doing Frontend work in JS, and I hope one day there can be an Elm-like experience for backend development as well.

Just off the top of my head a few bits of what I like about Elm: - You can actually write code, have no errors, and then move on, and never return to the project again. When I was doing JS, everyone I knew just took it for granted that you would be maintaining everything you ever wrote for the rest of your career. Not with Elm! You can actually finish projects and never return to them. - Its a simple and small language that is designed to interact with human beings. The compiler really talks to you instead of spitting out error codes or spaghetti. Apis and variables have human readable names instead of mathy terms of symbols. - For everything theres one way of doing things and the one way is usually really good. This strong consensus orientation of the Elm community means everyone is speaking the same language about every problem.

Gotta go, bye.

Re: Asset minification with Elm (2018)

#22

Post by absynce »

pictur wrote: post #4

Has anyone started a project with elm and continued it for a long time?

I've worked on two (2) substantial production Elm applications.

1. Healthcare

Fall 2017, I started integrating Elm into an AngularJS application after experimenting with it on a couple of side projects. After a successful initial feature, I convinced the team to use it for new features. Another couple of developers helped to create the initial version until late 2018. We started in Elm 0.18 and converted it to 0.19. Now a sole part-time college student maintains and adds new features to it.

2. Transportation management

Since January 2019, I work on an Elm project, once again weaved into an existing AngularJS app, with ~34k lines of Elm code. I inherited it with no interaction from the previous developer. It looks like it was introduced in mid-2017 and is currently on Elm 0.19. Although it is not perfect, not always following best practices, it is much easier to maintain than anything I've worked on in the past. On JS apps, I've torn my hair out trying to figure out what is going on and attempting to add new features.

With Elm, I refactor daringly and rest more easily.

Please let me know if you have any specific questions.

Re: Asset minification with Elm (2018)

#23

Post by excursionist »

Chadtech_Real wrote: post #21
pictur wrote: post #4

Has anyone started a project with elm and continued it for a long time?

I have been writing Elm for 5 years now. I work at Humio, where our front end is 100k lines of Elm code. What would you like to know? I love Elm. I'm absolutely hooked. I don't want to go back to doing Frontend work in JS, and I hope one day there can be an Elm-like experience for backend development as well. Just off the top of my head a few bits of what I like about Elm: - You can actually write code, have no error…

> I hope one day there can be an Elm-like experience for backend development as well.

Haskell?

Re: Asset minification with Elm (2018)

#24

Post by ronanyeah »

excursionist wrote: post #23
Chadtech_Real wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been writing Elm for 5 years now. I work at Humio, where our front end is 100k lines of Elm code. What would you like to know? I love Elm. I'm absolutely hooked. I don't want to go back to doing Frontend work in JS, and I hope one day there can be an Elm-like experience for backend development as well. Just off the top of my head a few bits of what I like about Elm: - You can actually write code, have no error…

> I hope one day there can be an Elm-like experience for backend development as well. Haskell?

Unfortunately there is a large gap between the developer experience of both ecosystems.

Re: Asset minification with Elm (2018)

#27

Post by owl57 »

Chadtech_Real wrote: post #21
pictur wrote: post #4

Has anyone started a project with elm and continued it for a long time?

I have been writing Elm for 5 years now. I work at Humio, where our front end is 100k lines of Elm code. What would you like to know? I love Elm. I'm absolutely hooked. I don't want to go back to doing Frontend work in JS, and I hope one day there can be an Elm-like experience for backend development as well. Just off the top of my head a few bits of what I like about Elm: - You can actually write code, have no error…

> You can actually finish projects and never return to them

How do you manage that? Migrating from 0.18 to 0.19 wasn't hard in my limited experience, but it wasn't "finish and never return" either.

Re: Asset minification with Elm (2018)

#28

Post by amimetic »

bastawhiz wrote: post #5

I don't want to downplay Elm's accomplishments here, but I really disagree with the "RealWorld" example here. Does a 29kb asset make a meaningful difference compared to a 100kb asset? Especially if the framework is a fixed chunk of that, the space savings as the project grows in size is not incredibly meaningful in the grand scheme of things. 50kb of excess code on my page due to missed optimizations isn't going to k…

"better tools for mocking in tests, ways to build custom lint rules": thanks to Elm being pure functional you don't really need mocking. And the amazing DX/tooling would make linting in style of JS completely unnecessary. So no need to toil over these issues at all in Elm. It won't help with isomorphic rendering.

(I write this as someone who mainly does TypeScript, but did a few months of paid Elm work. The main problems with Elm I see are the lack of jobs + as of 0.19 the hostile (NB technically, not personally) approach to those not aligned with Evan's direction for Elm).

Re: Asset minification with Elm (2018)

#29

Post by augustin82 »

pictur wrote: post #4

Has anyone started a project with elm and continued it for a long time?

We've been using it in production since the end of 2015. We have two main products whose front-end is written entirely in Elm, a third one in development, totalling about 80k loc.

It's a blast, it's a wonderful developer experience, it's changed my life as a developer after having to fight with Angular and React and the myriad of tools you need to use to have a decent experience.

It would be difficult for me to consider a position where I would not use Elm anymore, and if I did it would have to satiate my thirst for functional programming by letting me work with other cool similar languages.

Re: Asset minification with Elm (2018)

#30

Post by Chadtech_Real »

owl57 wrote: post #27
Chadtech_Real wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been writing Elm for 5 years now. I work at Humio, where our front end is 100k lines of Elm code. What would you like to know? I love Elm. I'm absolutely hooked. I don't want to go back to doing Frontend work in JS, and I hope one day there can be an Elm-like experience for backend development as well. Just off the top of my head a few bits of what I like about Elm: - You can actually write code, have no error…

> You can actually finish projects and never return to them How do you manage that? Migrating from 0.18 to 0.19 wasn't hard in my limited experience, but it wasn't "finish and never return" either.

I dont even think upgrading to 0.19. If you have 0.18 code that works, why upgrade? I think NoRedInk has some very old versions of Elm still in production, like 0.16 or something.
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