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

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

#41

Post by savanaly »

ambrozk wrote: post #22
ISV_Damocles wrote: post #17

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 tr…

It's incredible that on just about every piece I've ever read about Elm since they made that decision, this has been the first, second, and third comment. Wanting to try Elm for myself, I disregarded this advice, and.... immediately ran into the exact same problem! I've never seen such a promising project so conclusively killed by pure developer pigheadedness. And, amazingly, they've never backed down at all. They do…

Out of curiosity, what did you try to do that you hit that issue right away? I've been writing Elm apps as side projects for years, and never even come close to the kernel thing being a problem. My apps are mostly graphically undemanding games and helper tools. What are the types of applications where this becomes an issue right away?

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

#42

Post by ddellacosta »

wryoak wrote: post #35
ddellacosta wrote: post #14

I wouldn't bother with Elm. Among other things: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fxvlow/why_im_... PureScript ( https://www.purescript.org ) on the other hand is very nice.

PureScript made some ergonomically painful decisions (I value the logic behind their implementation of tuples but not having to use them in such a way), but I think the biggest point against it is how Haskell is moving into that space via JS and WASM compiler targets and bringing along its broader user base and library support

Yeah the way tuples work in PS is kinda painful, but there are some affordances for tuple-like pattern matching that smooth over some of that pain.

On the other hand, I feel like PureScript's records that utilize row polymorphism are such a game changer that it's hard for me not to get frustrated with Haskell records when I go back. And while I love where Haskell is going with WASM and JS support, I think it'll be a little while before that is viable for real-world projects.

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

#43

Post by kriiuuu »

ISV_Damocles wrote: post #17

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 tr…

If you want to try TEA, but not Elm I reccomend Scala.js with Tyrian[1]. Scala.js is a wonderful, mature project and Tyrian gives you the elm architecture in a very pragmatic way.

[1]: https://tyrian.indigoengine.io/

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

#44

Post by whosthatguy »

wryoak wrote: post #35
ddellacosta wrote: post #14

I wouldn't bother with Elm. Among other things: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/fxvlow/why_im_... PureScript ( https://www.purescript.org ) on the other hand is very nice.

PureScript made some ergonomically painful decisions (I value the logic behind their implementation of tuples but not having to use them in such a way), but I think the biggest point against it is how Haskell is moving into that space via JS and WASM compiler targets and bringing along its broader user base and library support

> Haskell is moving into that space via JS and WASM compiler targets and bringing along its broader user base and library support

This has been an initiative for longer than PureScript has existed. I wouldn't expect it to replace PureScript any time soon to be honest.

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

#45

Post by hombre_fatal »

josephcsible wrote: post #16

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.

Jeez, at some point you folks who don’t like Elm’s decisions have to leave the theater so the rest of us can enjoy the show.

If you think a cult of personality is bad, you aren’t appreciating how much worse is, to the rest of us, the cult of anti-cheerleaders on every post that mentions Elm.

For years now any time someone wants to read about Elm, they have to hear from the same few HNers who don’t even use it yet refuse to let it go.

It’s like every time Dune plays in the movie theater, the same crowd comes in to explain how shit it is, how different it is from the book, in fact check out this ancient blog post about how bad it is, and there’s no way yall in the audience will enjoy it so don’t even try! The director sucks too, just look what he did! He fkin did that! It’s actually impossible to enjoy the movie once you know all the facts. And the guy who made the movie didn’t listen to my meticulous feedback and it hurt me cuz boy do I have opinions about how a Dune movie should be made, believe you me.

Meanwhile we just want to watch the dang movie.

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

#46

Post by hombre_fatal »

ISV_Damocles wrote: post #17

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 tr…

I have to agree that this is FUD. So, it’s impossible to use the language in production because FFI is async (ports)? lol, come on guys.

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

#47

Post by matsemann »

ISV_Damocles wrote: post #37
matsemann wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> making it impossible to actually use the language in production Just FUD. I've been on a big team writing a webapp used by hundreds of thousands each day. While it's not necessarily my own first choice, it was great and the least error prone piece of software I've written in my career.

It is impossible if you're being responsible. You don't choose a technology that could potentially block you from solving problems in the future unless it brings a huge value to you. Elm's value proposition is mostly being a functional language with an opinionated MVU library baked in, so you can reproduce that value with a better functional language and selecting a similar MVU library in that other language, which m…

Now you're moving the goalpost. You said it was impossible to use in production. Which is clearly wrong.

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

#48

Post by matsemann »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #40
matsemann wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> making it impossible to actually use the language in production Just FUD. I've been on a big team writing a webapp used by hundreds of thousands each day. While it's not necessarily my own first choice, it was great and the least error prone piece of software I've written in my career.

I've also had the pleasure of maintaining an Elm codebase. It was filled to the brim with state update bugs. You could never trust what you saw in your browser. Nobody in the team understood how the codebase worked. I spent days implementing some extremely simple changes, which barely worked (to the same standard as the rest of the codebase). Never again.

I don't blame a Rust-codebase for being bad just because I don't know Rust.

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

#49

Post by matsemann »

savanaly wrote: post #41
ambrozk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incredible that on just about every piece I've ever read about Elm since they made that decision, this has been the first, second, and third comment. Wanting to try Elm for myself, I disregarded this advice, and.... immediately ran into the exact same problem! I've never seen such a promising project so conclusively killed by pure developer pigheadedness. And, amazingly, they've never backed down at all. They do…

Out of curiosity, what did you try to do that you hit that issue right away? I've been writing Elm apps as side projects for years, and never even come close to the kernel thing being a problem. My apps are mostly graphically undemanding games and helper tools. What are the types of applications where this becomes an issue right away?

Most likely they didn't understand Ports and immediately wanted to reach for kernel stuff.

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

#50

Post by matsemann »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #45
josephcsible wrote: post #16

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.

Jeez, at some point you folks who don’t like Elm’s decisions have to leave the theater so the rest of us can enjoy the show. If you think a cult of personality is bad, you aren’t appreciating how much worse is, to the rest of us, the cult of anti-cheerleaders on every post that mentions Elm. For years now any time someone wants to read about Elm, they have to hear from the same few HNers who don’t even use it yet ref…

I'm quite curious what Elm triggers so in people, that they years later actively hunts down discussions about it to interject their negativity.
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