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Elm at Rakuten

engineering.rakuten.today

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Re: Elm at Rakuten

#71

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#72

Post by whateveracct »

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…

A seasoned small Elm team will probably scale to higher complexity heights than a small JS team in my experience. Same goes for Haskell and the like.

The freaking out about "oh no I gotta write a small library myself" is absurdly overblown here. Most of the time I see it, it's people flipping out at the very sight of there not being something available off-the-shelf. The actual cost is much lower than the panic implies.

In general, people see ANY time spent in an FP language to solve FP problems as "a waste of time" but they're blind to the wastes of time people treat as "real code" in mainstream languages.

But yeah if you're a software efficiency bean counter, maybe you won't like FP. Fair point.

My opinion is the long-term technical & cultural benefits and opportunities pay off. And as a developer, I am happy to not optimize my development velocity to the utmost if it means I don't have to waste my brainpower writing imperative code. My mind is in a much better state at the very least :)

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#73

Post by aszen »

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…

Elm is build on top of solid foundations, and has a good standard library unlike js so it's much easier to reinvent things as you say. One of the core ways to ship products quickly is to ensure you don't break things often, and elm lets u do that provided one learns it well enough

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#74

Post by aszen »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #32
dimitrios1 wrote: post #12

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…

as an example i made a firebase auth client in elm using their api and json decoders in elm. honestly i feel it's much better than the official js client for the app i was building because it's so focused, minimal and exactly suited to my app's architecture

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#75

Post by aranchelk »

platz wrote: post #60
aranchelk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 is an important point; I think it applies to varying degrees to any less popular language or framework. It’s a little worse with Elm because of the restri…

curious if you using halogen or react-basic? I've gone with halogen for a small project and it's been fine but sometimes i wonder if react-basic is a better choice.

This is an area where I ventured far from the ordinary and wrote my own application framework. I'll eventually open source it and write an article about the process. In short:

I was completely sold on the Elm architecture, but I used Haskell too long to be comfortable working without typeclasses, so I went through a couple different elm-like frameworks written for PureScript. I settled on one only to later realize what (I think) people are talking about when they say "Elm doesn't compose", which is not well articulated in that statement. I take it to mean: you can never really deal with stateful components in isolation because they have to work off of a unified global data structure. I developed some new tech that makes different tradeoffs and it got me what I wanted.

I knew developing my own framework was going to add a lot of extra work: * Writing the framework (not too bad, actually) * Writing the reusable components and combinators (exactly what you'd expect)

By far he hardest part has been establishing patterns and best practices working with a new and different architecture, I struggled with that for a while.

I'm a strong believer in the points made in Graham's Beating the Averages (actually what brought me to HN) and in my case I'm establishing a tech stack for my current and future projects, so I believe the framework was a worthwhile investment.

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#76

Post by macintux »

G4BB3R wrote: post #64
macintux wrote: post #24

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...

Ah, I see, lamdera isn’t a “we’ll change Evan’s architectural decisions” kind of fork, which seems to be much of the source of contention.

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#77

Post by JamesSwift »

pjlegato wrote: post #55
Silhouette wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the popular wisdom but I question how universally applicable it is. We all know that having the best technology doesn't necessarily mean you win in a commercial market and we all know that being first mover can be an advantage, but those observations don't tell us what will be successful in the long term. How often does substandard technology and technical debt become a drag on a business not long after that…

I totally agree. Engineering should be the best it can be, within the constraints of the resources available. My post was addressing the common case where an engineer seems to ignore the 'resource constraints' side of the equation altogether. Balancing these factors is more art than science. No two projects have the same set of resource constraints, nor the same set of engineering challenges. Luck is a big factor. Th…

See also: engineers who think that engineering considerations trump all other business considerations. You need to know when it makes holistic sense to rewrite, or ship a hack. There are a lot more people at the decision-making table than just engineering.

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#79

Post by rtfeldman »

macintux wrote: post #69
rtfeldman wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

My word choice certainly could have been better (I was upset, and it showed), but to quote what I said there anyway: "If you understand the design goals, but don't agree with them, why not channel that in a positive way - e.g. by building something that fits your vision instead of directly working against Elm's design goals?" - in substance, this is consistent with what I said above: it's totally encouraged if anyone wants to go in a different direction from Elm's design, just please don't call it Elm.

As it turned out, this is exactly what the OP in that thread did - he created https://www.mint-lang.com - which I think is a very positive development indeed!

Re: Elm at Rakuten

#80

Post by decafbad » 

  mkose@casper:~/Desktop$ ./elm repl
  ---- Elm 0.19.1 -----------------------------------------
  > Basics.modBy 0 3
  Error: Cannot perform mod 0. Division by zero error.
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