11–20 of 73 posts
I've never written anything in Elm but that short post makes me want to try it. Sounds like a pretty great feature of a language to have easy to follow error messages you can readily pick up. This also made me chuckle
"""I thought Elm was a pure, functional language, but this is one hell of a side effect."""
What does this mean? There is almost no detail in this other than "Wow Elm is great and the compiler gives persistent, detailed messages" which I think most people interested in Elm already knew.
ok nice. We know that. I'm personally touching Elm only after they have something like ComponentDidMount from React or something which is better implementend than "wait 50msec and do something like set focus" on their (virtual) DOM rendering is solved: https://github.com/evancz/elm-todomvc/blob/8be8914582870d599...
Of course it could be better, and that's probably what you are getting at. Ideally the machinery provided for building web applications would be more aware of the nature of web applications and have something in the box (still explicit and obvious, but in the box) to do something like setting focus.
This has always been my experience with TDD, at least if you always leave yourself a failing test when you go. A lot more labor-intensive, since you are essentially writing the "compiler" as you go, but a similar effect.
You're still free to quickly sketch out ideas without worrying about type checking, but you can solidify things by just adding /* @flow */ to the top of a file and fixing the errors.
I haven't actually tried Elm though, so maybe a "middle-ground" isn't necessary.
If this were a post about soap (the salt, not the protocol) we'd downvote the post as obvious content-free shilling. But because it's some obscure language that doesn't even make the top 100 TIOBE language list, here we are, upvoting someone we've never heard of, celebrating his opinion of awesome compiler error messages that none of us has ever seen, for a language that nobody uses.
This kind of comment about Elm is quite hard to understand without context. Have you ever used a typed language before? Have you ever used a pure language before? Is there something special about Elm that gives you this kind of benefit, or do other languages do the same thing?
EDIT: I didn't mean to say that Haskell is as easy, or that the error messages are as good. I just mean that the error messages can give you a nice reminder of what you were working on, which I believe was the point of this post.
This is the perfect example of the content-free HN posts that are topping the charts lately. It contains not a single example of a "helpful error message." Nor a single line of code from the language in question. Just a 173 word free-verse poem with some feel-good handwaving. If this were a post about soap (the salt, not the protocol) we'd downvote the post as obvious content-free shilling. But because it's some obsc…
This kind of comment about Elm is quite hard to understand without context. Have you ever used a typed language before? Have you ever used a pure language before? Is there something special about Elm that gives you this kind of benefit, or do other languages do the same thing?
Haskell does the same thing. EDIT: I didn't mean to say that Haskell is as easy, or that the error messages are as good. I just mean that the error messages can give you a nice reminder of what you were working on, which I believe was the point of this post.
This has always been my experience with TDD, at least if you always leave yourself a failing test when you go. A lot more labor-intensive, since you are essentially writing the "compiler" as you go, but a similar effect.
I think "gradual typing" like Flow might be a nice middle-ground. You're still free to quickly sketch out ideas without worrying about type checking, but you can solidify things by just adding /* @flow */ to the top of a file and fixing the errors. I haven't actually tried Elm though, so maybe a "middle-ground" isn't necessary.