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Elm at Rakuten

engineering.rakuten.today

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Re: Elm at Rakuten

#31

Post by rtfeldman »

superdisk wrote: post #26
rtfeldman wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I think the main reason for this perception is that people in the Elm community have gotten increasingly tired of correcting inaccuracies people like to post about Elm on Hacker News. I spent a bunch of time doing that in the past, and eventually stopped because I felt like Sisyphus. The same people would crop up on the next thread repeating the same things anyway. Of course if the claims go unchallenged, it…

Speaking as someone who liked Elm for a while, then abandoned it, I will say that the biggest problem with the language is absolutely its leadership. Development moves at an absolutely glacial pace and basically takes place with no transparency at all. I would argue that it's more like a "source available" project than an "open source" one since the core dev team is so exclusionary. Most planning takes place inside E…

This is an example of the type of post I was referring to being tired of correcting.

I don't use Reddit anymore, but if memory serves there have been about 5 people total banned from the aforementioned Elm subreddit, which is fewer than 1 ban per year it's existed.

I invite anyone to evalute the accuracy of "Dissent is silenced and banned" with that data point in mind, and to evaluate the accuracy of the other above claims accordingly.

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#32

Post by PragmaticPulp »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #12
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #2

Interesting 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 no…

> but it’s not ideal if you’re trying to run a lean team that ships products quickly. Good. The longer I do this, the longer I realize that unless your in a race-to-the-bottom industry (something like vying for eye balls to increase ad spend), then this is categorically a bad thing. I would prefer the quality of engineering required in knowing how to do some of these things yourselves. Take your time. Understand what…

> I would prefer the quality of engineering required in knowing how to do some of these things yourselves.

Realistically, a couple of engineers writing a library from scratch isn’t going to be higher quality than adopting a mainstream, battle-tested library that accomplishes the same thing.

Writing your own implementations of everything can be fun, but it’s not possible to compete with all of the iterations and reviews that a mainstream library collects over time.

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#33

Post by hashkb »

dmix wrote: post #25

> We had global variables everywhere, and debugging was a nightmare. ES6 module imports really helped solve this problem and is a giant step forward in the JS ecosystem. Despite being relatively straight forward they were (and are) a big deal. Any JS project before that was a giant dance of complex window namespacing, closure wrappers, and hoping the 3rd party library you’re using doesn’t expect some weird custom thi…

esbuild and TS are a good step you can take incrementally as you move away from webpack/babel. Still the lesser of some evils, but less evil is better.

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#34

Post by toastal »

cardanome wrote: post #29
theobeers wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the opening section of the blog post, I wondered why an incremental move to TypeScript wouldn’t have worked for them. The rest seems to be all about Elm (I haven’t read it thoroughly), but I feel there’s a disconnect between the problem they started with and their choice to dive into a wholly new ecosystem. edit: Ah, hold on; I just got to where they comment on this. “TypeScript, which adds optional static typin…

TypeScript has a slow compiler and horrendous error messages (especially compared to the Elm). Plus it is far away from the no runtime exception guarantees that Elm offers by design. Also TS is just part of a potential solution while Elm comes with all batteries included. You still have to set up your code formater, liner, decide on a framework, state management library and so on and so on. With Elm, you just use elm…

Elm also has a sound type system and no side effects because it doesn't need to be compatible with vanilla JavaScript

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#35

Post by arcade79 »

I wonder if someone will create 'pine' - "pine is not elm".

(For younglings: elm was an email client. pine was also an email client. The latter was often thought to be short for 'pine is not elm').

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#37

Post by cultofmetatron »

rtfeldman wrote: post #31
superdisk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as someone who liked Elm for a while, then abandoned it, I will say that the biggest problem with the language is absolutely its leadership. Development moves at an absolutely glacial pace and basically takes place with no transparency at all. I would argue that it's more like a "source available" project than an "open source" one since the core dev team is so exclusionary. Most planning takes place inside E…

This is an example of the type of post I was referring to being tired of correcting. I don't use Reddit anymore, but if memory serves there have been about 5 people total banned from the aforementioned Elm subreddit, which is fewer than 1 ban per year it's existed. I invite anyone to evalute the accuracy of "Dissent is silenced and banned" with that data point in mind, and to evaluate the accuracy of the other above…

Interesting food for thought. I bought your book awhile back and was 2 chapters in before reading about the aforementioned "Dissent is silenced and banned" issues which led me to abandon continuing at the time. Maybe I'll jump back into it.

I've not heard of such misinformation being spread about other languages. Id love to hear your side on why Elm itself seems to attract such ire if its inaccurate.

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#38

Post by vmchale »

macintux wrote: post #24
jeofken wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it not be to prevent supply chain attacks, and to guarantee the user that all code you run is pure and type safe? They don’t hinder anyone from forking and removing this limitation, allowing any package author to run native code on your machine.

> They don’t hinder anyone from forking and removing this limitation, allowing any package author to run native code on your machine. That has arisen a few times here. Yes, they actually do actively discourage forking (to the point of threatening “excommunication” from the community).

Yeah if anything the need to constantly fork the compiler indicates a problem lol.

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#39

Post by wing-_-nuts »

arcade79 wrote: post #35

I wonder if someone will create 'pine' - "pine is not elm". (For younglings: elm was an email client. pine was also an email client. The latter was often thought to be short for 'pine is not elm').

I have fond memories of using the pine email client. It was so fast. I know mutt is another one, supposedly, but by the time I was considering switching, I had exclusively moved to web mail.

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#40

Post by zoul »

rtfeldman wrote: post #31
superdisk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as someone who liked Elm for a while, then abandoned it, I will say that the biggest problem with the language is absolutely its leadership. Development moves at an absolutely glacial pace and basically takes place with no transparency at all. I would argue that it's more like a "source available" project than an "open source" one since the core dev team is so exclusionary. Most planning takes place inside E…

This is an example of the type of post I was referring to being tired of correcting. I don't use Reddit anymore, but if memory serves there have been about 5 people total banned from the aforementioned Elm subreddit, which is fewer than 1 ban per year it's existed. I invite anyone to evalute the accuracy of "Dissent is silenced and banned" with that data point in mind, and to evaluate the accuracy of the other above…

FWIW, I have the same experience as the parent poster. I used to love Elm, evangelized the architecture, wanted to write Elm professionally. I was constantly bumping into things that were not finished or working, but didn’t really mind. But I also often encountered cases where the leadership team was saying “we don’t want this discussion here, thank you very much”, even if the discussion was perfectly legitimate, friendly, technical and related to some sorely needed feature or bugfix. I constantly felt unwelcome, like I was trespassing on someone’s lawn. I didn’t want to base my work on that. Eventually I just shrugged and left.
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