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Elm at Rakuten

engineering.rakuten.today

61–70 of 180 posts

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#61

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…

> 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.

It's not that simple. I realize this may be uncommon, but it's possible to work on a product that is truly worthwhile, that improves peoples' lives, and whose target users urgently need a solution to the problem you're solving. I recently developed a product that I believe meets this description (I won't plug it here). I chose Elixir for the web application. While I think that's a defensible choice, given the real-time nature of the application, I sometimes wonder if I would have been better off choosing a more mainstream language -- one with an official Stripe client library, for one thing. Any day I spent unnecessarily reimplementing something because I chose Elixir is a day that the target users couldn't benefit from my product. And, bearing that in mind, I should get back to work.

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#62
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).

Just to correct this: for as long as I can remember, Evan's stance has been "feel free to fork Elm, just please don't call your fork Elm, since that would confuse people."

There have been a couple of forks with different names, and nobody's been "excommunicated" or whatever. The forks haven't gotten much traction, but they're probably still out there.

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#64
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).

That's not true, lamdera is a fork and has it's own channel inside elm slack. Terezka (that is from core team) already said that if part of the community wants to fork Elm, that would be ok.

https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/clients-expressing-doubt-ab...

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 revie…

Once you detach from "I must use a library for every thing" land, you begin to realize you don't need the overwhelming majority of them. Which results in writing cleaner, simpler, more focused code, with less of a surface area for bugs. It's a whole mindset, tbh.

I appreciate libraries for:

- ubiquitous things, like data structures

- hard to get right things, like time

- implementations of specs, like Unicode

- hardware interfaces, like CUDA

For everything else, I'll take the above and roll my own solution.

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. It's not that simple. I realize this may be uncommon, but it's possible to work on a product that is truly worthwhile, that improves peoples' lives, and whose target users urgently need a solution to the problem you're s…

In a more mainstream language, while it may have a few Stripe client libraries but if your true use case of being real time isn't full filled then it makes no sense to choose them. A working stripe client takes at most a day to write, compared to years that can go in changing the architecture of your application

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#67
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

That's not true, lamdera is a fork and has it's own channel inside elm slack. Terezka (that is from core team) already said that if part of the community wants to fork Elm, that would be ok. https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/clients-expressing-doubt-ab...

I have heard otherwise, both in comments here and via https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/#forka..., but it’s entirely possible I’m wrong.

Added: This comment is also not terribly friendly.

https://github.com/gdotdesign/elm-github-install/issues/62#i...

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#68
post #56

anybody using purescript and its streamed ui lib ?

Do you have a link for this library?

I just spent 10 minutes digging google and I cannot find it again.

I didn't even try to find about it last year, it seemed the only ui lib for purescript with a tiny docs website (beige / pale themed)

Really surprised not being able to find it again.. I'll reply again if I end up finding it

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Just to correct this: for as long as I can remember, Evan's stance has been "feel free to fork Elm, just please don't call your fork Elm, since that would confuse people." There have been a couple of forks with different names, and nobody's been "excommunicated" or whatever. The forks haven't gotten much traction, but they're probably still out there.

I have heard otherwise, both in comments here and via https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/#forka..., but it’s entirely possible I’m wrong.

Added: This comment is also not terribly friendly.

https://github.com/gdotdesign/elm-github-install/issues/62#i...

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 revie…

This is a common argument i have seen devs make when evaluating building from scratch vs adoption, here's what building from scratch gives you, a leaner more understandable piece of code that does what you want and nothing more.

An open source library is necessarily generic and has to be battle tested to make sure it fulfills all use cases, while the library you write only has to cover your own needs that makes it easier to understand, extend and debug

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