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Why we chose Elm for Humio’s web UI

humio.com

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Re: Why we chose Elm for Humio’s web UI

#21

Post by matsemann »

preommr wrote: post #18

Ok, exaggerations about elm's safety aside, there's the huge issue of it's readiness for production. It's not just a fledgling project, it's a project that's being carried by one person for a very broad scope, and it's been going for a very long time now. Contrast that with something like vue, where Evan You has a fair amount of corporate sponsorship, has a much smaller scope (i.e. not an entire new language), big fo…

The safety isn't an exaggeration, though I can understand it can be hard to believe when not experienced first hand just how hard it is to introduce bugs in elm. Like type safety eliminates one type of bugs, elm's stricter safety eliminates even more. When there is only one place in the whole code base that is allowed to have side effects, that removes lots of the bugs normally seen in frontend. Can't recall we ever having a runtime bug. And most logical bugs are also eliminated since they are harder to actually make.

It's ready for production. We've been using it for years without issues or bugs. It works as it is right now, and has done for years. It's not like it would stop working out of the blue.

Re: Why we chose Elm for Humio’s web UI

#22

Post by GiorgioG »

preommr wrote: post #18

Ok, exaggerations about elm's safety aside, there's the huge issue of it's readiness for production. It's not just a fledgling project, it's a project that's being carried by one person for a very broad scope, and it's been going for a very long time now. Contrast that with something like vue, where Evan You has a fair amount of corporate sponsorship, has a much smaller scope (i.e. not an entire new language), big fo…

The bus-factor of one is too high a risk for me unless I'm creating a throw-away project.

Re: Why we chose Elm for Humio’s web UI

#23

Post by blacktriangle »

deergomoo wrote: post #16

Apologies if this is too off-topic, but I'm currently trying to decide between Elm and ClojureScript to get started with FP. Can anyone weigh in with recommendations? The points this article makes like strong typing pull me towards Elm, but people talk about understanding Lisps as a nirvana-like state of enlightenment, which pulls me towards Cljs

I think the bigger issue between Elm and Clojurescript is that while Clojurescript is a language, Elm really is a total toolkit for web application development. Elm has its own virtual DOM, various types for interacting with the browser, and is very possesive of the DOM making pulling in non-Elm code challenging.

Meanwhile writing a web app with Clojurescript will require making more choices around libraries you want to pull in, although you can always just go with re-frame which is awesome.

As far as more theoretical learning, I'd go with Clojurescript. Clojurescript is a real lisp with all the fun stuff you can do there. Elm is an intentionally gimped ML variant made so to make it more palatable to the Javascript developer community. If your goal is to learn about typed FP while running in the browser, you'd be better off with ReasonML.

Re: Why we chose Elm for Humio’s web UI

#24

Post by kristiandupont »

hannofcart wrote: post #2

Happy Humio user here. Love the product. I think there were some recent changes to the front-end too that makes it feel snappier than before. Great job on that too. However, at the risk of sounding like insensitive clod who makes critical comments on a post talking about its front-end, if I can offer one criticism of the web interface it's that it doesn't responsively adapt to mobile resolutions nicely. I get that th…

I was a happy Humio user too, until they disabled my account without warning about a month ago. Obviously not the fault of the authors here though, so I won't take away from the article :-)

Re: Why we chose Elm for Humio’s web UI

#25

Post by k_bx »

preommr wrote: post #18

Ok, exaggerations about elm's safety aside, there's the huge issue of it's readiness for production. It's not just a fledgling project, it's a project that's being carried by one person for a very broad scope, and it's been going for a very long time now. Contrast that with something like vue, where Evan You has a fair amount of corporate sponsorship, has a much smaller scope (i.e. not an entire new language), big fo…

I’ve batte-tested Elm on many projects at this point. It has its quirks, but it’s great. The language is so simple and its compilers so small that I’m not really afraid of the bus-factor. Worst case — I’d fork the compiler and apply the fixes I need.

Re: Why we chose Elm for Humio’s web UI

#26

Post by smotti »

deergomoo wrote: post #16

Apologies if this is too off-topic, but I'm currently trying to decide between Elm and ClojureScript to get started with FP. Can anyone weigh in with recommendations? The points this article makes like strong typing pull me towards Elm, but people talk about understanding Lisps as a nirvana-like state of enlightenment, which pulls me towards Cljs

If you want to get started quickly and don't want to stress about how to do something than Elm. From my personal subjectiv experience I never felt such joy to build a web-based frontend. Because of its type system and the model it enforces on how to do things. Also in my experience when the code compiled it really just worked (besides logic errors the compiler can't catch). Refactoring was also a breeze with the help of the compiler. Another big plus are the error messages procuded by the compiler which are the best i've seen so far. So overall i found it to be a really good beginner experience.

Whereas CLJS is at the other end. A tool for experienced developers who know what they want and how to do it. As it requires you to make a lot of choices. That Elm, for most parts, already made for you.

Re: Why we chose Elm for Humio’s web UI

#27

Post by dd82 »

Elm as a language is really nice, and I do like the goals of the project. I tried it out a bit, its a mind-bending paradigm for someone coming from OOP/prototype (Python, Java, JS) and I enjoyed the challenge.

The community, on the other hand, is what turned me off. It does seem very unfriendly to newcomers. In addition, https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/ amongst others, is an entire turnoff. And seems like this perception isn't isolated and has been discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821447

I hope things work out well for you in this project with Elm, now and in the future. But it doesn't seem like any of the issues with the community have been even attempted at being addressed, so I don't think I will give Elm another try.

Re: Why we chose Elm for Humio’s web UI

#28

Post by dkarl »

deergomoo wrote: post #16

Apologies if this is too off-topic, but I'm currently trying to decide between Elm and ClojureScript to get started with FP. Can anyone weigh in with recommendations? The points this article makes like strong typing pull me towards Elm, but people talk about understanding Lisps as a nirvana-like state of enlightenment, which pulls me towards Cljs

If you're writing modern Javascript, you're halfway to Lisp nirvana already. Lisp was a huge mind-expander for people like me coming from BASIC, Pascal, and C++. Building programs out of functions was an entirely new way of thinking: writing functions that returned functions, creating abstractions that were parameterized by functions, etc. That is already normal to you.

The other big Lisp nirvana thing is macros, and let's face it, they're cool, but the best way to use macros is sparingly, especially when you're working with other people, so they don't make as fundamental a difference to the way you code as you would expect. At least in my experience; YMMV.

If you're coming from modern Javascript and looking for a big idea that will change how you go about the job of programming, I think working with a static type system will be a bigger eye-opener.

Re: Why we chose Elm for Humio’s web UI

#29

Post by rtfeldman »

preommr wrote: post #18

Ok, exaggerations about elm's safety aside, there's the huge issue of it's readiness for production. It's not just a fledgling project, it's a project that's being carried by one person for a very broad scope, and it's been going for a very long time now. Contrast that with something like vue, where Evan You has a fair amount of corporate sponsorship, has a much smaller scope (i.e. not an entire new language), big fo…

For what it's worth, Elm is extremely battle tested.

We have over 400K lines of Elm in production, and have been using it since 2015. We've been super happy with it, and have no interest in going back to JS or TS.

(To be totally honest, at this point I can't imagine even a hypothetical JS/TS framework that could bring enough benefits for us as a business to justify giving up Elm's compiler and package ecosystem. I'd be super impressed if someone managed that though!)

Re: Why we chose Elm for Humio’s web UI

#30

Post by antew »

Glad to see more posts on Elm out there, it really is a great language and ecosystem! Like any large project, it has some issues, but in my day-to-day writing code I have never had as much fun, or had as much confidence that my code does what it says on the tin, as I have with Elm.

I wanted to give a shout out to one of Jeroen's other projects in the Elm ecosystem, elm-review (https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/jfmengels/elm-review/l...), it is an excellent linter/fixer and allows writing your own rules as well.

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