On Sunday, November 6, 2016 at 8:49:07 PM UTC, Francesco Orsenigo wrote: > > > CoffeeScript and Elm address two vastly different problems. > > CoffeeScript addressed "Writing JS is a pain in the ass": it was syntactic > sugar and the need for it drastically lessened with ES6. > CS was killed by the new JS extensions. > > Elm addresses run time errors and JS Fatigue, neither of which JS can > address organically. In fact, the more JS evolves, the more its syntax is > extended, the worse JS Fatigue becomes. > With respect, I'm not sure that the essence of JS fatigue is new features of the language itself, although I suppose ES5 to ES2015 is quite a big change. As I hear it, it's rather the explosion of build tools, library managers, static analysers, code architectures, front-end frameworks and Alt-JS syntaxes that compile to JS. Too many choices, that keep changing too fast! If you're convinced by Elm, then sure, it's the answer to a lot of those choices. But if you're still at the point of making that choice, Elm just adds one more set of options to most of those categories, and - from one perspective - adds to JS fatigue.
IMHO, Elm will fade only when there will be another language that > simplifies the whole build pipeline and is more appealing to newbies. > >From where I sit, that's only part of the answer. Being easy to learn will certainly make it easier to bring more people in, but the longevity of the language will depend on a lot of other, sometimes quite intangible factors. Among which might be (and I claim no expertise here, these are off the top of my head): * is there a governance process for the language so that it changes in a stable, controlled way? Companies are less likely to commit to any solution prone to radical or unpredictable shifts * is there a process for considering and approving/rejecting changes and feature requests? * do bugs in the language and core libs get fixed in a timely way? * is there a growing, critical mass of libraries for common tasks? Is there community participation in maintaining those libraries? * is the community overall inclusive and open? Does it have (and enforce) a code of conduct? * is there a pre-established mechanism for reporting and dealing with security issues? I'm not saying that all of those have to be in place from day one, and some of them may already be in place (I'm kinda new here myself). But those are the kinds of factors that my colleagues and customers would consider as important before making large-scale investments in any particular technology. At the last Melbourne Meetup we had twice as many RSVPs as the Clojure > meetup and three times as many as the Haskell one. > That's great to hear! Getting off the runway clearly requires lots of energy and velocity, and I'm hearing great things about Elm from that perspective. But maintaining cruising altitude for a long flight is another set of concerns on top of that :) Ian -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Elm Discuss" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to elm-discuss+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
