Such aggressive tone, no need, very off putting and unconstructive. If I was considering employing the author and came across this article I'd be seriously put off despite the fact he clearly knows a thing or two.
Elm is Wrong
21–30 of 218 posts
Re: Elm is Wrong
#22I'm not particularly interested in Elm, but basically this post is about one problem in the language. One. This doesn't make the language a pile of garbage as the author seems to let you think.
I'm a Python programmer. I fully expect dict keys to be able to be arbitrary objects. But after coding a lot in JS, I realized I could live without it. It's nice, but it's not a show stopper if I don't have it.
Same goes here. Yes, typing is not as good as you wish it was, but Elm is a young language, give it time to evolve. In the meantime, what about the innovative things in it ?
Re: Elm is Wrong
#23As someone who's written a language, the need to have a personal approval from a founder before being published to the site stuck out to me more than the typeclasses. I'd argue in favor of it, so long as the review is done in a timely process. I can understand wanting a smaller number of high-quality, reviewed libraries that are tested and shouldn't break.
Re: Elm is Wrong
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
The post is opinionated and a bit aggresively worded. But his(/her?) major complaint is valid: lack of type classes, which completely kills essential composability and generic properties of Haskell. And the module system doesn't offer MLs features to make up for it (signatures). This means that Elm requires boilerplate for things that are elegantly handled by type classes. You may also look at Purescript [1], a more…
You can do everything that you can with typeclasses without them. In fact GHC compiles Haskell into GHC core, where are no typeclasses. See http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/typeclass.html
Quote from the second paragraph:
> Knowing what TEDIOUS JOB GHC is doing for us helps us appreciate more the convenience of type classes.
Thanks for the link though, I think I read it a few years ago.
Re: Elm is Wrong
#25What's a good alternative to Elm?
Eve looks like it is filling the same sort of role: http://programming.witheve.com
Re: Elm is Wrong
#26Unfortunately this is an opinionated piece with foul language and it is a bit offensive. Sandy should take into account that Elm is created by one person pretty much (Evan Czaplicki) who created it in his PhD thesis and has been maintaining it since. So it's someones baby still, and they might be offended.
It is a remarkable for one person to create a language, runtime, repl, debugger, compiler to another quirky language i.e. JS that is usable to the point that people are doing professional work in Elm. Also the compiler produces easy to understand messages.
Evan has made Functional reactive programming more accessible. I don't think I would have a chance to understand FRP at all without Elm. Elm has inspired other frameworks in Purescript and the development of ReactJS.
Sure Elm is not perfect. I found that much of the JS ecosystem not viable in the Elm world, even with FFI due to the purity of the virtual dom. I can't just go and easily chuck an impure calendar control in my code.
However despite it's drawbacks I feel the article was a bit strong in putting down Elm, which is sad because I think there are the seeds of some great future languages and ideas in there.
Re: Elm is Wrong
#27tl;dr static typing adds lots of complexity to everything, just use Clojurescript instead.
Ok, I'm jesting. And I like static typing. But sometimes it is easy to get lost in it when you just want to be productive instead.
Re: Elm is Wrong
#28As someone who's written a language, the need to have a personal approval from a founder before being published to the site stuck out to me more than the typeclasses. I'd argue in favor of it, so long as the review is done in a timely process. I can understand wanting a smaller number of high-quality, reviewed libraries that are tested and shouldn't break.
The restriction only applies to native modules (modules that ship with Javascript): https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/elm-dev/1JW6wknkDIo/H9...
Re: Elm is Wrong
#29> [119 people] Of whom, we can assume the majority are web-programmers, and, by association, that Elm’s is likely the strongest type-system to which they have been exposed.
No.
Re: Elm is Wrong
#30What's a good alternative to Elm?
PureScript, BuckleScript, and GHCJS, are all good options depending on your risk sensitivity and lang preference.