Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web frontend from React (2019)

benhoyt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 95 posts

Re: Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web frontend from React (2019)

#11

Post by cyberpunk »

_raul wrote: post #5
jrvarela56 wrote: post #2

I tried Elm in ~2018 and it was delightful. Ended up checking it out bc it was mentioned as 'prior art' in Redux's website. Didn't end up adopting bc everyone around me thought I was crazy to use something so niche. It's the kind of thing that even if you don't end up using, you come out with lessons that make you a better programmer. Some that I remember: - The compiler was fast, it made me aware that you could have…

Exactly the same delightful experience here. Sadly it’s only become an even harder sell since then.

Every single place I've worked that adopted it has like one or two elm repos left where no one has had the time to rewrite it into ts yet, and there's maybe one developer who still understands it.

I've not seen anyone picking it for new dev in... a really long time.

Shame, really.

Re: Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web frontend from React (2019)

#12

Post by zanellato19 »

roebk wrote: post #10
datadeft wrote: post #8

The website tells the full story: https://elm-lang.org/ © 2012-2021 Evan Czaplicki

What story does that tell? React's would say 2022 - https://github.com/facebook/react/releases There's engineering effort happening behind the scenes on both projects, the releases have slowed, and big changes are coming to both Elm and React.

Elm seems pretty much dead to me, tbh, which has prevented me from even trying it for the last few years and I know I'm not the only one.

Re: Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web frontend from React (2019)

#13

Post by throwaway2847 »

zanellato19 wrote: post #12
roebk wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What story does that tell? React's would say 2022 - https://github.com/facebook/react/releases There's engineering effort happening behind the scenes on both projects, the releases have slowed, and big changes are coming to both Elm and React.

Elm seems pretty much dead to me, tbh, which has prevented me from even trying it for the last few years and I know I'm not the only one.

There was a major loss of confidence and enthusiasm due to things like this. Very much not a project to build a business on

https://dev.to/kspeakman/elm-019-broke-us--khn

Re: Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web frontend from React (2019)

#15

Post by pyrale »

roebk wrote: post #10
datadeft wrote: post #8

The website tells the full story: https://elm-lang.org/ © 2012-2021 Evan Czaplicki

What story does that tell? React's would say 2022 - https://github.com/facebook/react/releases There's engineering effort happening behind the scenes on both projects, the releases have slowed, and big changes are coming to both Elm and React.

I believe the important part is not the date so much as the copyright.

Basically, if you build on Elm, you're living inside Evan's personal project.

There are upsides (Evan did a great job designing the language) and downsides (Evan's goal isn't being a maintainer, and he locked the ecosystem in such a way that many things can't be done without him).

Re: Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web frontend from React (2019)

#16

Post by josephcsible »

For anyone new to Elm, remember that as of version 0.19, unless your project is one of the Elm core team's pet projects, you'll have a severely restricted feature set available. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821447, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17842400, and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510267 for details.

Re: Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web frontend from React (2019)

#17

Post by ISV_Damocles »

The year in this link is very important. In the following year, the Elm team decided to not pay attention to the maxim "perfect is the enemy of good" and crippled their FFI story, making it impossible to actually use the language in production[1].

I would recommend to steer clear of a language that makes these sorts of decisions -- that certain features are off-limits to the regular developer because they can't be trusted to use them correctly -- because if you find yourself in a situation where you need that to solve your problem, you're trapped. I included Go in the set of languages I would recommend steering clear of for years, due to their decision to allow their own `map` type be a generic[2] type but no user-defined types could be[3], leading to ridiculously over-verbose codebases, but they have finally corrected course there.

If you're looking for something kinda like Elm but not likely to break your own work in the future, I'd recommend checking out ReasonML[4] instead.

[1]: https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/ [2]: https://go.dev/blog/maps [3]: https://go.dev/doc/faq#beginning_generics [4]: https://reasonml.github.io/

Re: Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web frontend from React (2019)

#18

Post by boxed »

cyberpunk wrote: post #11
_raul wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly the same delightful experience here. Sadly it’s only become an even harder sell since then.

Every single place I've worked that adopted it has like one or two elm repos left where no one has had the time to rewrite it into ts yet, and there's maybe one developer who still understands it. I've not seen anyone picking it for new dev in... a really long time. Shame, really.

I use it at work. I tried to write Vue once and just hated it with a passion, so rewrote that part in Elm and was much happier.

Re: Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web frontend from React (2019)

#19

Post by boxed »

zanellato19 wrote: post #12
roebk wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What story does that tell? React's would say 2022 - https://github.com/facebook/react/releases There's engineering effort happening behind the scenes on both projects, the releases have slowed, and big changes are coming to both Elm and React.

Elm seems pretty much dead to me, tbh, which has prevented me from even trying it for the last few years and I know I'm not the only one.

Honestly it's better now that it's dead. The 0.18->0.19 transition was a big disaster. Imagine if we got one of those ever year for the last five years! I think that's what would have happened if Evan had continued to be able to produce new versions.

Dead means it's super stable. Stable is good.

Post reply on HN