Elm at Rakuten
engineering.rakuten.today
Elm at Rakuten
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Re: Elm at Rakuten
#2Interesting breakdown of some pros and cons of using Elm in production. However, it appears the JavaScript codebase they used for comparison was quite bad and maybe not representative of a good or even typical JavaScript app:
> Our JavaScript application had global variables everywhere, and debugging was a nightmare
Point #3 in their list of cons is especially important for anyone considering Elm:
> Because Elm is not a mainstream language, it is sometimes necessary to reinvent something that could otherwise have been acquired by adopting a different technology.
This is the biggest downfall of Elm projects that I’ve seen in the real world. Teams end up spending half of their time or more solving problems that could have been accomplished quickly with some off the shelf React libraries with numerous tutorials online.
This attracts a lot of developers who enjoy working on libraries and tooling, but it’s not ideal if you’re trying to run a lean team that ships products quickly.
Elm is fun, but I wouldn’t use it unless I could afford to hire a relatively huge team to absorb all of the additional complexity and detours that go into building an Elm app. There’s a constant promise of Elm being faster and easier to write for various reasons, but in practice it always seems to get bogged down in endless gotchas and framework shortcomings that need to be addressed before we can get down to getting real work done.
Re: Elm at Rakuten
#3Elm looks interesting but when it pops up around here and other places it is usually about how the main dev does not work and play well with others.
It is a bit off putting.
It is nice to see a different perspective.
Re: Elm at Rakuten
#4The "Elm at Microsoft" link is broken and when I google for it, I can only find an archived package on Github.
Re: Elm at Rakuten
#5Elm is awesome, its compiler is awesome, but its ecosystem is kinda stalling, isn't it?
I mean, a lot of libraries aren't updated to the last lang version, debugging JS-Elm interactions been a real challenge for years, yadda yadda. Overall I'd say Elm ecosystem doesn't receive enough attention to survive.
I'm not complaining, I'm just sad about that and kinda surprised I didn't found a mention of that in the OP article.
Re: Elm at Rakuten
#6Wouldn't it be difficult to find other developers that are experienced using Elm? I don't know much about it tbh.
Probably, one of my biggest career mistakes was opting for a little known PHP cms instead of WP as I thought it would be easier for the stakeholders to work with the limited options.
Since then, I've always avoided going away from the mainstream toolset.
Re: Elm at Rakuten
#7I'd like to recommend Elm at work but I can't because it's still below a major version of 1, which implies there may be a good deal of rework in the short term.
I did get an Elm app upgraded from 0.18 to 0.19 without too much extra work, but I'm concerned a major version release may bring much more changes.
Re: Elm at Rakuten
#8The "Elm at Microsoft" link is broken and when I google for it, I can only find an archived package on Github.
This link works for me: https://elmtown.simplecast.com/episodes/it-just-goes-on-and-...
Re: Elm at Rakuten
#9The "Elm at Microsoft" link is broken and when I google for it, I can only find an archived package on Github.
Its right here from the "Other Testimonies" section:
https://elmtown.simplecast.com/episodes/it-just-goes-on-and-...
Obviously Microsoft is a huge company so they use all of the languages, but I find it surprising given the amount of investment they've made into Typescript.
Re: Elm at Rakuten
#10Wouldn't it be difficult to find other developers that are experienced using Elm? I don't know much about it tbh. Probably, one of my biggest career mistakes was opting for a little known PHP cms instead of WP as I thought it would be easier for the stakeholders to work with the limited options. Since then, I've always avoided going away from the mainstream toolset.
> Wouldn't it be difficult to find other developers that are experienced using Elm?
Yes, however:
- Elm has a very small surface area (you can read through the guide [0] in a weekend)
- There are many folks who love functional programming && are willing to learn Elm
So, given those two facts, the lack of Elm developers compared to other "markets" is not a big issue.
For me, personally, the only risk with Elm is its incredibly opaque development. It's led by Elm's BDFL and a few other folks and it's almost as though they go out of their way to make Elm hard to adopt for outsiders.
For example, all you have to do is change elm's version to 1.0.0 to signal to outsiders that, yes .. Elm is and has been production ready for quite a while now (years?). Instead "insiders" will reason and rant about how 0.19.1 is fine.
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