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Elm from a Business Perspective

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Re: Elm from a Business Perspective

#11

Post by projektfu »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #3

The academics always miss this part. They assume the most elegant and concise form of expression for an idea or a concept is equivalent to pragmatism. When in reality pragmatism in software engineering is mostly about making things obvious enough at a cheap enough price point. This is why golang is so popular even though all the academics on r/programming hate it.

I agree, sometimes you just compound the cleverness too much. There's lots of software that could be written in J in about 150 characters that might take much more in other languages. But I can come back to a line of J and wonder, "what was I doing there?" for a long time. Similarly, I have to stay current in Haskell for it to continue making sense. If I put it down for a few months, I come back and have to re-learn a lot of concepts each time, especially to understand other people's libraries as they adopt the next cool thing.

Re: Elm from a Business Perspective

#12

Post by skybrian »

petetnt wrote: post #10

> But than again, Elm is not too easy. This means that almost every developer I see that is already involved in Elm is a seasoned developer. Getting experienced developers on board means that they are immediately productive, which means we gain more per hour. Not really seeing this as a strong point. It feels like the same mindset that drove me away from Scala (and many others [0]!). Sure, it might be good for the co…

I don't think he's saying that Elm is actually hard to learn (like Scala or Haskell).

Re: Elm from a Business Perspective

#13

Post by rifung »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #3

The academics always miss this part. They assume the most elegant and concise form of expression for an idea or a concept is equivalent to pragmatism. When in reality pragmatism in software engineering is mostly about making things obvious enough at a cheap enough price point. This is why golang is so popular even though all the academics on r/programming hate it.

> They assume the most elegant and concise form of expression for an idea or a concept is equivalent to pragmatism.

Alternatively, perhaps many academics don't care about pragmatism and appreciate elegance and conciseness for their beauty. Admittedly I might be projecting, but part of the reason I have considered getting a PhD is to stop having to concern myself with the interests of the industry and money.

Re: Elm from a Business Perspective

#14

Post by jlarocco »

petetnt wrote: post #10

> But than again, Elm is not too easy. This means that almost every developer I see that is already involved in Elm is a seasoned developer. Getting experienced developers on board means that they are immediately productive, which means we gain more per hour. Not really seeing this as a strong point. It feels like the same mindset that drove me away from Scala (and many others [0]!). Sure, it might be good for the co…

My interpretation of that sentence was that it's easy for developers familiar with other languages to pick up Elm, but less easy for people with little or no experience what-so-ever.

I think he was contrasting with languages like Haskell and Scala, where even people very experienced with other languages have a hard time picking them up.

Re: Elm from a Business Perspective

#16

Post by swsieber »

petetnt wrote: post #10

> But than again, Elm is not too easy. This means that almost every developer I see that is already involved in Elm is a seasoned developer. Getting experienced developers on board means that they are immediately productive, which means we gain more per hour. Not really seeing this as a strong point. It feels like the same mindset that drove me away from Scala (and many others [0]!). Sure, it might be good for the co…

You hire experienced developers. Then you teach them Elm.

Re: Elm from a Business Perspective

#17

Post by renlo »

rtfeldman wrote: post #8
the_duke wrote: post #2

Well. Summary: "I have no idea about the technical criticism or type classes, but we use Elm and it works for us. It's easy, you are productive quickly (quicker than with React/Angular), it prevents bugs, devs like it, and so it saves us money." It's nice to hear that a company is able to utilize Elm effectively. It would be nice to know how big their 5 Elm projects "in various stages and different scale" are to judg…

> Would also be nice to know how they deal with boilerplate, which is a big annoyance with Elm in my opinion when you come from, eg, Haskell. We have over 55,000 lines of Elm code in production at http://noredink.com and it's now the majority of our front-end. Students use our site to answer millions of questions per day, and they've answered over 2 billion questions total. I think this qualifies us as a "big project…

The creator of Elm works for your company though [1]. Seems like your experience is going to be a lot different from the average developer because you can probably walk 20 steps to the designer of Elm to ask a question. I haven't used Elm just raising the point.

[1] https://twitter.com/czaplic

Re: Elm from a Business Perspective

#18

Post by wyager »

rtfeldman wrote: post #8
the_duke wrote: post #2

Well. Summary: "I have no idea about the technical criticism or type classes, but we use Elm and it works for us. It's easy, you are productive quickly (quicker than with React/Angular), it prevents bugs, devs like it, and so it saves us money." It's nice to hear that a company is able to utilize Elm effectively. It would be nice to know how big their 5 Elm projects "in various stages and different scale" are to judg…

> Would also be nice to know how they deal with boilerplate, which is a big annoyance with Elm in my opinion when you come from, eg, Haskell. We have over 55,000 lines of Elm code in production at http://noredink.com and it's now the majority of our front-end. Students use our site to answer millions of questions per day, and they've answered over 2 billion questions total. I think this qualifies us as a "big project…

> Our Elm code is about as DRY as our JavaScript code

Not to be flippant, but that's not saying much.

Re: Elm from a Business Perspective

#19

Post by dkarapetyan »

sotojuan wrote: post #6
dkarapetyan wrote: post #3

The academics always miss this part. They assume the most elegant and concise form of expression for an idea or a concept is equivalent to pragmatism. When in reality pragmatism in software engineering is mostly about making things obvious enough at a cheap enough price point. This is why golang is so popular even though all the academics on r/programming hate it.

This is interesting because Elm has been removing features that Evan considers "too hard" and confusing for the average developer. I'd argue it's not "academic" any more (though it might be interesting for an academic who wants to do UI).

Yes, that is my point. I don't think Elm is "too academic". I think it strives for pragmatism in real world engineering scenarios and that is why it gets flak from a certain segment of the programming community. Similar to how golang does.

Re: Elm from a Business Perspective

#20

Post by sotojuan »

renlo wrote: post #17
rtfeldman wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would also be nice to know how they deal with boilerplate, which is a big annoyance with Elm in my opinion when you come from, eg, Haskell. We have over 55,000 lines of Elm code in production at http://noredink.com and it's now the majority of our front-end. Students use our site to answer millions of questions per day, and they've answered over 2 billion questions total. I think this qualifies us as a "big project…

The creator of Elm works for your company though [1]. Seems like your experience is going to be a lot different from the average developer because you can probably walk 20 steps to the designer of Elm to ask a question. I haven't used Elm just raising the point. [1] https://twitter.com/czaplic

Not only does the creator of Elm work there but so do the people who know Elm more than anyone else in the world. Literally. While it's proof Elm can work it's not really a fair comparison for teams wanting to adopt it.
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