I remember hearing the creator of F# talk about their lack of type classes too - basically he didn't /want/ the abstractions you can have in Ocaml.
On the other hand, listen to Haskell people talk about the lack of standardisation, it's a kitchen sink of optional abstractions. And hard to teach. Upshot is - *suprisingly* these languages & ideas are still left-field. Elm is quite a radical proposition, to both beginners and functional language veterans. But it's one that I think has a good shot of succeeding. On Thu, 10 Nov 2016 at 08:04 Peter Damoc <pda...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Nov 9, 2016 at 11:27 PM, Gaëtan André <gaetan.an...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > As a newcomer it puzzles me. What are your opinions on it? > > People look for different things in Elm. Some look for a Haskell > replacement in the front-end domain. > Some of these people do not spend enough time to understand *why Elm is > not Haskell* and become frustrated. > This frustration ends either with a silent move to another language (e.g. > Purescript) or with a violent, bitter outburst like the referenced article. > > I believe Elm is not only "not wrong" but actually "very right". > Main selling points of Elm are learnability and maintainability. > > In order to get there Elm provides a context where developer willpower is > less needed for creating readable and maintainable code. > > It's a trade-off. > It has less clever facilities than Haskell but this means the less people > are puzzled by Elm code. > A larger percentage of Elm code is readable by a person starting with the > language. > *This is not a trivial advantage*. > > We've seen this happening in the Elm community with the change from 0.16 > to 0.17. > In 0.16 The Elm Architecture (TEA) became the prevalent way to write code > and a very powerful but also problematic part of the language, the Signals, > were delegated to a library (StartApp). > This allowed for the removal of the Signals in 0.17. > This moved pissed off the people using the power of the Signals BUT it > made the code easier to learn and more maintainable for the large majority > of people getting started with Elm. > > If Elm keeps doing this kind of stuff it will end up becoming a very > simple language. It will be a different kind of simplicity, the simplicity > from these quotes: > > "I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I > would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” - > Oliver Wendell Holmes > “Simplicity is complexity resolved.” - Constantin Brancusi > > Python community has the Zen of Python to guide them to good code. > Most of those ideas happen by default in Elm. > This means that Elm beginners can create good code accidentally. :) > *This is not a trivial advantage*. > > > > -- > There is NO FATE, we are the creators. > blog: http://damoc.ro/ > > -- > 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. > -- 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.
