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Elm is Wrong

reasonablypolymorphic.com

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Re: Elm is Wrong

#51

Post by mikekchar »

logicallee wrote: post #34

Leo Tolstoy on War and Peace: "I decided to write a detailed story about events surrounding the French invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of five Russian aristocratic families; since I haven't used the language before, for kicks I decided to do it in Swahili. This blog post will summarize why I hate Swahili and why it's totally unsuitable for writing…

> It doesn't take "a few weeks" to learn a programming language!!!

No, it doesn't. It takes a few hours.

Which, I'm sure sounds flippant, but hear me out. In the 25-30 years I've been a professional programmer, I've been paid to use many different languages. FORTH, Fortran, C, C++, Pascal, Protel, C#, Java, Perl, Ruby, Go, Javascript/Coffeescript, and Python are the ones that come off the top of my head, but if I were to go through my CV, I'd definitely remember a few more.

Anyone who has programmed in a handful of the above will notice that (with the exception of FORTH) these languages are practically identical. They all have slightly different features and slightly different syntax, but once you know one, you can pick up another one pretty easily. Especially once you know 5 or 6 of them, you practically don't even need to look at the docs. Just glance at some example code and you are on your way.

Libraries and frameworks take a lot more time than languages. There are lots of crazy details that you have to remember. Luckily, most of the major languages of the same type have very similar base libraries. As long as you stay away from frameworks, you can be productive pretty much immediately. Learning the details can take a few weeks, but mostly its unimportant. Frameworks suck. I've been working in Rails on and off for... 4 years???? I'll never put that damn thing on my CV. I still don't understand how it works.

So, I don't know this author, but he is clearly knowledgeable in Haskell. Maybe he also knows Ocaml. It would take you about 15 seconds to pick up Elm from that background. The rest is discovering (and apparently complaining) about the bits that don't live up to your expectations. He didn't comment on the state of the libraries (except to complain about the political process for getting libraries distributed with the official tools).

I'm not going to defend his rant. I didn't enjoy the tone and I think he completely misses the point of why the language is there. But his technical complaints are perfectly reasonable.

I didn't vote you down, but I suspect the reason other people did is that you are a bit too quick to criticise the author's ability to accurately judge the language. He seems perfectly capable, even if I disagree with his conclusions and his tone.

Re: Elm is Wrong

#52

Post by lmm »

jedimastert wrote: post #3

This might seem like a silly question, but what would happen if you tried to use the same kind of system, but with another language?

What do you mean by "system"? The post talks about how other languages solve the problem, e.g. typeclasses, or emulating them with classes.

Re: Elm is Wrong

#53

Post by mambodog »

bbcbasic wrote: post #26

Unfortunately 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 lan…

   Elm has inspired ... the development of ReactJS
I don't think that's true. React is a descendant of XHP, and predates Elm. Perhaps you were thinking of Redux?

Re: Elm is Wrong

#54

Post by Singletoned »

sametmax wrote: post #22

I'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.…

> I'm a Python programmer. I fully expect dict keys to be able to be arbitrary objects.

I'm a Python programmer too, and I also fully expect dict keys to be able to be arbitary objects, and I get really frustrated with the fact that they can't be arbitary objects. They have to be hashable objects, and the hash function refuses to hash certain objects that it has decided aren't allowed.

Re: Elm is Wrong

#55

Post by chillitom »

mfukar wrote: post #44
chillitom wrote: post #21

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.

> very off putting and unconstructive One of those is irrelevant and the other one is false. There's a lengthy, clear description of a problem, with a use case, leading up to a feature request...how is all of that "unconstructive"? In fact, what's definitively unconstructive is the way the feature request is closed: dismissing the use case as invalid, despite the fact there's a description of the rationale behind it…

To clarify, the aggressive tone is non-constructive, as in it detracts from the article. You're right he makes a constructive point but I bet a bunch of people don't bother reading that far.

Re: Elm is Wrong

#56

Post by gshulegaard »

Singletoned wrote: post #54
sametmax wrote: post #22

I'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.…

> I'm a Python programmer. I fully expect dict keys to be able to be arbitrary objects. I'm a Python programmer too, and I also fully expect dict keys to be able to be arbitary objects, and I get really frustrated with the fact that they can't be arbitary objects. They have to be hashable objects, and the hash function refuses to hash certain objects that it has decided aren't allowed.

I was going to reply to him, but you beat me to it. But since you posed a different question regarding the term hashable, I thought I would link some helpful starting docs (for you and/or others):

https://docs.python.org/3/glossary.html#term-hashable

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4348232/python-dictionary...

Re: Elm is Wrong

#57

Post by glenjamin »

This post starts off with an abstract goal - "use a custom type as a dict key", and then goes off down a rabbit hole trying to create typeclasses and make it work. This is despite prior knowledge that Elm has chosen not to implement type classes.

The line from Evan, Elm's creator, has always been along the lines of "show me a concrete actual use-case that you can't do without typeclasses", this article fails to clear that fairly low bar.

The other elm article from the other day about select boxes did a much better job of identifying that not having a way to enumerate Enum types is a bit annoying.

Re: Elm is Wrong

#58

Post by logicallee »

mikekchar wrote: post #51
logicallee wrote: post #34

Leo Tolstoy on War and Peace: "I decided to write a detailed story about events surrounding the French invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of five Russian aristocratic families; since I haven't used the language before, for kicks I decided to do it in Swahili. This blog post will summarize why I hate Swahili and why it's totally unsuitable for writing…

> It doesn't take "a few weeks" to learn a programming language!!! No, it doesn't. It takes a few hours. Which, I'm sure sounds flippant, but hear me out. In the 25-30 years I've been a professional programmer, I've been paid to use many different languages. FORTH, Fortran, C, C++, Pascal, Protel, C#, Java, Perl, Ruby, Go, Javascript/Coffeescript, and Python are the ones that come off the top of my head, but if I wer…

So my point was actually about the specifics of picking up a language to do a new project, and then complaining about it. (Hence my example of writing a serious book in a language you don't know.)

I think you really go into superlatives here. It's not fair for you to say "15 seconds", for example. 15 seconds is how long you've been reading this comment.

(I just timed myself, okay maybe 10-13 seconds.)

I also think that "a few hours" is an exaggeration on your part. Let's pick a language you've never used - take Objective-C which is similar to C# and C, C++ which you've already listed, and I think you've never programmed in it, because if you had you would probably have listed it.

Okay, so now make a serious iOS app in Objective-C in "a few hours". As in, have one by this time tomorrow. See? It's crazy. That's not how it works.

Maybe the weeks and months and decades run together for you, but there is a huge difference between doing something for a few months or a year, or doing something for a couple of weeks as our author reports. I don't like his kind of blog posts, and it is a whole category - there is this whole type of blog post where you pick something you've never used, use it to do something new, and then complain about it, all within the space of your first week or two using it.

It strikes me as kind of ridiculous. Especially with a provocative title like "Elm is wrong." Literally, it's like Tolstoy writing War and Peace in Swahili, a language he didn't know, and then writing a blog post "Swahili is wrong" -- all within the space of two weeks of when he first learned Swahili. I might be exaggerating slightly, but I think my analogy holds. It's almost farcical.

Re: Elm is Wrong

#59

Post by mfukar »

chillitom wrote: post #55
mfukar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> very off putting and unconstructive One of those is irrelevant and the other one is false. There's a lengthy, clear description of a problem, with a use case, leading up to a feature request...how is all of that "unconstructive"? In fact, what's definitively unconstructive is the way the feature request is closed: dismissing the use case as invalid, despite the fact there's a description of the rationale behind it…

To clarify, the aggressive tone is non-constructive, as in it detracts from the article. You're right he makes a constructive point but I bet a bunch of people don't bother reading that far.

So what if the tone is aggressive? It's a venting piece. It says so in the second paragraph. Who cares if people bother reading it? Where it mattered - the actual github request - the tone of the discussion is right on point.

People who ignore the point to come here and complain about the tone, also further detract from the point.

FWIW, I find it extra hilarious that, in the context of employment search, I would form an opinion based on how - or what - a person _vents_.

Re: Elm is Wrong

#60

Post by darkseas »

mikekchar wrote: post #41
bbcbasic wrote: post #26

Unfortunately 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 lan…

Yeah I read this a few weeks ago and was similarly put off. I will give him one thing: it got me to start thinking about what I wanted in a functional language that compiles into JS, which ultimately steered me towards Purescript. I think fundamentally he's correct, but the point that he is missing is the intended audience of Elm. He was not it. Elm is much easier to grasp than Purescript, for instance. There is less…

Can I ask if you have found any equivalent to the Elm Architecture in Purescript?

I have looked at Elm, and Purescript and now Bucklescript, but I have not yet seen, or wired up myself, something like the Elm architecture.

I should probably buckle down and learn the wiring I need myself, but I have been finding the typing a little tough.

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