very cool - good job
Elm: a functional reactive programming language that compiles to JavaScript
31–40 of 51 posts
Re: Elm: a functional reactive programming language that compiles to JavaScript
#32Very interesting.
I'm also working on a senior undergraduate thesis project in a vaguely similar domain (static typechecking of Python, github.com/jruberg/pyty), so I have a couple questions:
- Is the code open source? If not, did you just choose to keep it closed source as your work on it for the thesis?
- The site mentions that it's statically typed with type inference; has your thesis work also involved formally proving such things?
- Is the goal of the thesis to make something academically interesting or practically useful? Personally, I've struggled with balancing time and wish I could focus more on packaging and making my project accessible.
Re: Elm: a functional reactive programming language that compiles to JavaScript
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Flapjax still has you deal with the abstractions provided by HTML and CSS. I generally think these abstractions are pretty problematic, but more subtly, this means you must think imperatively (e.g. modifying the DOM) which doesn't really fit with the FRP paradigm. Flapjax is also based on the classical formulation of FRP which I think is not ideal for this setting (that is a big part of my thesis). Nonetheless, I thi…
What specifically is your thesis? (I'm well-versed with the various formulations of FRP that have existed over the years.) P.S. the navigation links at the top of the page don't work in Opera. Why aren't they just links + :hover CSS? (I presume they're written using Elm but that's not good if people for whom Elm doesn't work want to find out more.)
That's a much tougher question. I am still early in the process, so I don't have a clean and clear answer yet. I am trying to approach FRP from the perspective of GUI design. In this context continuous Behaviors and discrete Events are not exactly what a developer would want to deal with. I don't want to go into it too much now, but I will definitely post my thesis once it is done.
Also, thanks for pointing out the Opera mistake. It is on my to-do list!
Re: Elm: a functional reactive programming language that compiles to JavaScript
#34Very interesting. I'm also working on a senior undergraduate thesis project in a vaguely similar domain (static typechecking of Python, github.com/jruberg/pyty), so I have a couple questions: - Is the code open source? If not, did you just choose to keep it closed source as your work on it for the thesis? - The site mentions that it's statically typed with type inference; has your thesis work also involved formally p…
Thank you :)
- It isn't open source right now. I think that's best while the language is still developing, but I plan on opening it up once things have settled down. I don't want to have legacy code before I've even started :P
- No, that aspect is fairly tangential. Since my language is heavily based on the lambda calculus, I already have pretty good basis for nice type properties. I don't have a formal semantics right now, so it will be a while before any such proof would even be possible.
- Both hopefully! I totally understand this dilemma. As lots of people here have pointed out, there is a lot of work to be done on the implementation, but the theoretical aspects of the language have to be a higher priority for the next couple months. It's stressful!
I wish you the best on your project! It sounds really ambitious / useful. I imagine such an analysis could help generate much faster code too.
Re: Elm: a functional reactive programming language that compiles to JavaScript
#35another coffeescript-like language.
How many do we need?
Re: Elm: a functional reactive programming language that compiles to JavaScript
#36Point of curiosity here, and I'm genuinely curious and not trying to snark; is it considered "compiling" when it's simply translating one source language to another? I see this term used a lot lately (and almost exclusively in the "... to javascript" context), so wondered if my preconceived notion was incorrect.
Re: Elm: a functional reactive programming language that compiles to JavaScript
#37Point of curiosity here, and I'm genuinely curious and not trying to snark; is it considered "compiling" when it's simply translating one source language to another? I see this term used a lot lately (and almost exclusively in the "... to javascript" context), so wondered if my preconceived notion was incorrect.
Compiling is translating from one language to another. Sometimes the target is machine assembly, sometimes virtual machine bytecode, and sometimes other language.
Re: Elm: a functional reactive programming language that compiles to JavaScript
#381 - You shouldn't re-use a name that already exists. Elm is a long existing mail client. Pick a different name.
2 - Is writing JavaScript really that hard to people that we need so many of these CoffeeScript like languages? JavaScript is really damn easy to write as is. The biggest pain is the DOM and there are various libraries to deal with that if you want.
Re: Elm: a functional reactive programming language that compiles to JavaScript
#39The website is down for me.
Re: Elm: a functional reactive programming language that compiles to JavaScript
#401 - You shouldn't re-use a name that already exists. Elm is a long existing mail client. Pick a different name. 2 - Is writing JavaScript really that hard to people that we need so many of these CoffeeScript like languages? JavaScript is really damn easy to write as is. The biggest pain is the DOM and there are various libraries to deal with that if you want.
This is not supposed to be only a JavaScript replacement. From what I see, JavaScript is just used as a really easy target for experimenting with functional reactive programming.