New Adventures for Elm • Hacker News Board

Re: New Adventures for Elm

#61

Post by girvo » Mon, Jan 04, 2016, 11:44 PM UTC

habitue wrote: post #45

epidemian wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What would a user with a screen reader hear if he or she were to visit that page? Well, the page still renders paragraphs and titles to good ol' s and s, so i'd presume a screen reader would just read those things as the page content. Wouldn't it?

the screen reader needs to execute the javascript before it can read the tags. I'm not sure if they do that

Most do, thankfully, and have done for a while now :)

Re: New Adventures for Elm

#62

Post by jeremyjh » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 1:11 AM UTC

jey wrote: post #30

I've been looking at the options for pure-functional languages targeting JS, and it seems that PureScript is superior to Elm from a technical perspective for full-stack webdev. PureScript takes the approach of providing a full Haskell-like language that is "native" to the JS world. It has the features and type system of Haskell, but atop a cleaned up version of Javascript's semantics (e.g. strict evaluation, not lazy…

Haste also generates reasonable output (it can be debugged, though it is nothing like as reasonable as purescript) and has a runtime that is only 500 lines of straightforward javascript. It had pretty haskellish runtime semantics (purescript doesn't) I was able to use my existing tools like hdevtools, and have what (with just a couple ifdefs) functions as a single code-base for client and server. But its community is just too small, its updates too sporadic. I couldn't see building a business on it. Purescript or Typescript would be the only compile-to-javascript languages I would consider for serious work.

Re: New Adventures for Elm

#63

Post by hanniabu » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 1:53 AM UTC

ZenoArrow wrote: post #50

rlander wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, "superior" is subjective in this case. It's like an OO programmer claiming that Smalltalk is a superior language than Elm. Besides, Purescript is squarely targeted at experienced Haskell programmers, which is not the case of Elm. Elm is an ML language, not a Haskell dialect that compiles to JS. I also evaluated Elm, Purescript, Roy, F#, JS_of_Ocaml and ended up choosing Elm precisely for the reasons you chose t…

> "Elm is an ML language, not a Haskell dialect that compiles to JS." To be clear, Haskell also comes from the ML lineage.

ML stands for machine learning, correct?

Re: New Adventures for Elm

#64

Post by tcard » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 2:02 AM UTC

hanniabu wrote: post #63

ZenoArrow wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Elm is an ML language, not a Haskell dialect that compiles to JS." To be clear, Haskell also comes from the ML lineage.

ML stands for machine learning, correct?

Not in this context. It's an old functional programming language that influences a whole family. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language)

Re: New Adventures for Elm

#65

Post by aarpmcgee » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 2:59 AM UTC

osener wrote: post #58

jey wrote: post #30

I've been looking at the options for pure-functional languages targeting JS, and it seems that PureScript is superior to Elm from a technical perspective for full-stack webdev. PureScript takes the approach of providing a full Haskell-like language that is "native" to the JS world. It has the features and type system of Haskell, but atop a cleaned up version of Javascript's semantics (e.g. strict evaluation, not lazy…

I've been thinking about this a lot lately and I think you might be right. I've been using ClojureScript professionally for years, shipped some stuff with TypeScript, used GHCJS for some side-projects, and not feeling satisfied with doing front end development with any of them I spent some time catching up with new front end tech and AltJS languages over the Christmas break. Here's my highly opinionated and shallow t…

I would seriously love a tutorial on how to write Redux actions/reducers/etc in Purescript.

Re: New Adventures for Elm

#66

Post by thedufer » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 3:03 AM UTC

hanniabu wrote: post #63

ZenoArrow wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Elm is an ML language, not a Haskell dialect that compiles to JS." To be clear, Haskell also comes from the ML lineage.

ML stands for machine learning, correct?

In this context, it stands for MetaLanguage, which is a language family (and was at one point a language itself, I believe). The family includes Ocaml (see the ml there?) and Haskell, among many others.

Re: New Adventures for Elm

#67

Post by hassox » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 3:20 AM UTC

As an experiment I tried rendering elm in the server. It's renders fine but I'm not sure that it doesn't re-render everything on page load.

http://blog.overstuffedgorilla.com/server-side-elm-with-phoe...

Re: New Adventures for Elm

#68

Post by nanoojaboo » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 3:22 AM UTC

"It's unprecedented for a company our size to hire a language creator," says R.Feldman of NoRedInk. http://tech.noredink.com/post/136615783598/welcome-evan This might be true, but it's also a very smart marketing investment. I would have never visited NoRedInk otherwise, and it's the kind of company that would benefit immensely from general word of mouth discussion

Re: New Adventures for Elm

#69

Post by wtetzner » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 3:39 AM UTC

One of the things I found odd (or maybe just annoying) is how the Elm Architecture doc [1] keeps mentioning how you can cleanly model your code using modules. But the module system is about as primitive as you could imagine. The language would be much more expressive with ML's module system, and functors would relieve some of the pain of not having type classes.

[1] https://github.com/evancz/elm-architecture-tutorial/

Re: New Adventures for Elm

#70

Post by rlander » Tue, Jan 05, 2016, 3:56 AM UTC

chenglou wrote: post #59

rlander wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, "superior" is subjective in this case. It's like an OO programmer claiming that Smalltalk is a superior language than Elm. Besides, Purescript is squarely targeted at experienced Haskell programmers, which is not the case of Elm. Elm is an ML language, not a Haskell dialect that compiles to JS. I also evaluated Elm, Purescript, Roy, F#, JS_of_Ocaml and ended up choosing Elm precisely for the reasons you chose t…

What were your reasons for picking Elm over js_of_ocaml?

If I remember correctly, js_of_ocaml was poorly documented and the community was miniscule at the time (we had a hard time finding code examples outside of Eliom on Github).

Also, I was the only one with actual OCaml experience, and the other devs found Elm much easier to learn.

We almost went with Funscript, I think, but unfortunately F# on *nix was a no-go.