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 <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Nov 9, 2016 at 11:27 PM, Gaëtan André <[email protected]> > 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 [email protected]. > 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 [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
