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Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

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Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#191

Post by appsappsapps »

collyw wrote: post #112
boubiyeah wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But are language enthusiasts really better hires in general? I've known many of them who loved the theory and toying with a language but were not any better at producing actual value than the average joe.

I have noticed a lot of language / framework collectors where every new project is in a new framework or language on their CV. While it will expose you to a lot of different ideas I doubt you will code very well in any of them if you are swapping every year. I have seen plenty of Python written like its Java and its just less elegant code. And Django code that doesn't follow best practices seems to be the norm. If yo…

The best ideas are those that you can share between languages. When you get hung up on idioms, or when you recreate idioms that don't matter in another language, that's where the problems are. Exposure to a lot of languages allow a person to figure out that union of computation that benefits all languages.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#192

Post by appsappsapps »

oblio wrote: post #57
s4vi0r wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The communities for languages like Elm are definitely smaller, but they're also "passion languages", if that makes sense. Nobody is learning elm because they've been or feel forced to (like you might with React, eg) or because they needed to maintain a legacy codebase at an old job or something. They're learning it because they're interested/like it, etc. So when it comes time to hire you have a small(er) pool of can…

F# is a bit surprising, since it’s already on top of a mainstream platform. If all else fails you can glue in C# if you ever find that you really can’t do something with F#.

Isn't Elm built on top of maybe the most mainstream "platform"? JavaScript? If all else fails you can glue in some JavaScript via its ports system[1].

[1]Languages like PureScript provide a much more convenient FFI for this glue, but the glue and escape hatch is still there with Elm.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#193

Post by dragonwriter »

crdoconnor wrote: post #111
kqr wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But are language enthusiasts really better hires in general? I've known many of them who loved the theory and toying with a language but were not any better at producing actual value than the average joe. I think they may be safer hires, anyway. They will be able to program themselves out of a wet cardboard box, which is more than you can say about the average Joe who may just be good at bluffing the interview.

Provided you dangle enough money and have a good interview process you can easily cull those people who can't code themselves out of a wet paper bag. The thing that would worry me about niche languages is the amount of wheel reinvention you'd have to do. Not sure the cost/benefit calculation starts to look so great any more when you realize that your enthused elm developers will have to build a whole lot of stuff tha…

> Provided you dangle enough money and have a good interview process you can easily cull those people who can't code themselves out of a wet paper bag

Interviewing costs money—good tech interviewing particularly so. The less of the people you have applying to start with, the more money you save on culling then by way of tech interviews.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#194

Post by sidlls »

yawaramin wrote: post #183
sidlls wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python has static typing? Since when? In what form?

Python 3 supports type annotations natively, and the mypy tool is an external typechecker that you can run just like any other static analysis tool during your build.

That isn't static typing.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#195

Post by nilkn »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #78
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #16

Haskell has enormous momentum now[1], and it's speed of development is accelerating. I came to it not because it was cool, but because my experience maintaining and refactoring a big Python program had become really painful. Haskell lets me keep the codebase smaller, it's easier to be pretty sure things are working, it's easier to refactor, and I'm sure the language will only keep getting better. Those are all unders…

That's been the story of Haskell for over 10 years. The world and other language ecosystems are changing faster than Haskell is growing. Clojure and Scala give you an alternative to Python that have the power of the Java ecosystem to take your programming out of academic and toy projects. And Python finally has static typing, 10 years after it was announced.

You're sort of painting a picture here of Haskell and all other languages skating towards some unknown target point, with Haskell skating the slowest. But, at the risk of sounding like a fanboy, it could be that Haskell simply started out significantly closer to that target point, so that other languages are effectively skating towards it.

In this way, both your statement and the parent's statement can be simultaneously true.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#196

Post by always_good »

quaunaut wrote: post #187
not_kurt_godel wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> say you used it at work Please don't do this. If you're not found out in the interview, you'll be found out on the job eventually due to your obvious lack of experience. Some of my most personally loathed coworkers have been people who have bullshitted their way into positions by claiming skills they don't have or aren't qualified in, making them a nightmare to work with.

Is there some way in which side project experience is different than professional experience no one has ever informed me of?

Aside, at least my side projects can be pushed to Github. I feel like committing to publishing a repo is the only reason I even finish anything, like writing a solid README, stubbing out a few issues, and then eventually closing them.

I never know if someone has seen my repositories but it's been invaluable to have projects I can confidently link to. Until I got to that point, I remember an anxiety of "gee, I sure hope they take my word for my skills." Talk about imposter syndrome.

But yeah, I agree with what you were trying to say. Whether you are honestly representing your skill level doesn't have much to do with whether your experience was paid or done in free-time.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#197

Post by brokenbyclouds »

rtfeldman wrote: post #33
mooreds wrote: post #2

My question is, how will he feel about this three years from now? When he is trying to hire someone? Or when the folks behind Elm don't update it as often as they should? The problem with unpopular languages is twofold: * lack of talent that can step right in and be effective * lack of resources to push the language forward The first can be remediated by planning to bring new hires up to speed, and just making that i…

Worth noting that in our experience, hiring has gotten way easier for us since we became an Elm shop. We really struggled to hire React engineers (who have a zillion positions to choose among - why would they pick ours?), whereas there seem to be a lot more great programmers who want to use Elm than there are companies hiring for Elm positions. Here's a verbatim quote from a cover letter (one I happened to be reading…

Worth noting is that you haven't been able to find a single criticism of elm in years. You hired the language designer so it's understandable that you'd have an easier time with the language. However, you've consistently kicked dust in everyone's eyes every time anyone has anything remotely critical to say about elm. It's frustrating because you are so smart and so insightful and it just looks like you're deliberately obfuscating the issue and for what? To what end? Because the language is so good? Bullshit. It isn't. It's a closed off, stagnant language that has no clear plan for its own future and zero plan for what would happen if Evan goes away. Please, for the love of God, just be able to point to a thing that is less than perfect about this average language.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#198

Post by brightsize »

rthomas6 wrote: post #105
brightsize wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Coconut: Simple, elegant, Pythonic functional programming." http://coconut-lang.org/

Wow, this looks very cool! Why is this not more popular? Coconut seems like something many people, including me, would want to use for every Python project of sufficient complexity. What's the catch?

Fanboy here. I've used Coconut extensively and it's a joy. I wouldn't start a (personal) Python-targeted project without it. Pattern-matching, a non-horrid lambda syntax, lazy evaluation, TCO, a built-in partial function syntax, and finally the pipeline operator (|>) are all things I'd hate to be without now. A more detailed list of features (incl. MyPy integration) is here: http://coconut.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ . The docs are just great too.

The catches:

1. You have to be OK with a compilation step that isn't part of the Python world.

2. To the best of my knowledge the language has been and still is being developed by a single person, so there's the "Evan gets hit by a bus" risk built in.

3. Tooling is virtually nonexistent. There's a Vim plugin that understands the language syntax but there's zero IDE support. Of course you can debug the generated Python with Pycharm/VS Code/etc and having done it I can say it's not terribly painful but isn't terribly fun either.

I think that over time the lack of tooling will be the biggest hindrance to the language's further adoption. OTOH I'd be curious to know if this has been a major factor in other unpopular languages remaining unpopular. I seem to remember a lot of complaints about tooling in the early days of Scala but the language still managed to become fairly successful once that situation improved.

Edit: formatting, final thoughts

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#199

Post by Spooky23 »

mooreds wrote: post #2

My question is, how will he feel about this three years from now? When he is trying to hire someone? Or when the folks behind Elm don't update it as often as they should? The problem with unpopular languages is twofold: * lack of talent that can step right in and be effective * lack of resources to push the language forward The first can be remediated by planning to bring new hires up to speed, and just making that i…

Sometimes niche technologies have benefits, as you can be a big fish in a small pond.

When I need to do something new, I look for small companies from weird places with promising products. I get favorable terms, and usually rapid turnaround in features as we figure out what things we though we needed vs reality.

Re: Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages

#200

Post by zenhack »

quotemstr wrote: post #88
mooreds wrote: post #2

My question is, how will he feel about this three years from now? When he is trying to hire someone? Or when the folks behind Elm don't update it as often as they should? The problem with unpopular languages is twofold: * lack of talent that can step right in and be effective * lack of resources to push the language forward The first can be remediated by planning to bring new hires up to speed, and just making that i…

In the worst case, you just adopt the runtime yourself. I don't understand why people draw boundaries around certain frameworks, runtimes, and languages and say "I'm hiring that kind of engineer". A good developer can go up and down the stack as needed and fix any part of it --- including the language runtime.

People do tend to have a mental block where the possibility of fixing one of their dependencies is something that wouldn't even occur to them. To the point where they'll implement really complex workarounds in their own code instead of submitting a one-line patch (or sometimes even reporting it).

That said, as someone who is no stranger to contributing to upstream, the prospect of becoming the maintainer strikes me as something that is certainly not to be done lightly.

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