Hey Mark! 👋

Thank you for taking time to look into this! 🤓

On Thursday, August 24, 2017 at 7:18:44 PM UTC+3, Mark Hamburg wrote:
>
> Ignoring the commands and subscriptions part, I think this could be 
> summarized as being built around having any of the things that would send a 
> message instead send a new state. This eliminates the level of indirection 
> of wrapping the desire to change the state into a message and then 
> unwrapping the message to actually do the state change.
>

I haven’t though of it in such a well-formalized manner, but yes, that 
sounds like it: I eliminate one level of indirection. Or at least at some 
level, because at the very top there is still a message that triggers the 
update, even if it’s a super-generic one. 🤔
 

> It is entirely based on data and hence should be compatible with message 
> recording for the debugger.
>

This looks about right too, as I mentioned in my response to Robin 
<https://groups.google.com/d/msg/elm-discuss/ta64y4JBMc4/kZK7DqQxCwAJ>, the 
debugger does as good of a job as it can with what I’m giving it. 👽
 

> On the other hand, the messages will lack semantic information. (One could 
> work around that by adding a logging text field that was set when building 
> the update message but ignored when applying it.)
>

Yeah, that’s true. As I’ve mentioned 
<https://groups.google.com/d/msg/elm-discuss/ta64y4JBMc4/kZK7DqQxCwAJ>, the 
reason why I haven’t sensed this problem is because I’m not using the Elm 
Reactor, because I don’t know how to get ports playing inside it. 😑
 

> Where this would seem to fall down is commands and subscriptions. Those 
> are going to produce asynchronous results and would risk baking in a stale 
> model state. This is particularly true for commands. Imagine, for example, 
> wiring up a tick command that will increment a tick field in the model 
> after five seconds. Since the command will be constructed to send the 
> single "set the state" message and since the only model it will have access 
> to is the one that existed when the command was constructed, it basically 
> becomes a "reset the state to where it was five seconds ago" command. If 
> subscriptions really do get rebuilt after every cycle of the update loop, 
> then this isn't a problem for them but the closure construction for each 
> subscription is an expense. If they don't get rebuilt — and the code in the 
> initial posting suggests that instead we're caching a subscriptions value — 
> then as with commands, it would seem easy to end up with code that 
> resurrects stale states.
>

Hm… I haven’t thought about this aspect of the commands+subscriptions duo, 
although I think I understand the mechanics. 🤔

So far I think I’m in luck: I have one port (a in/out couple actually) for 
talking to an external rich text editor, which I expect to be modal. The 
user clicks a button, the editor opens in a modal dialog, edit-edit-edit, 
then closes the editor and passes back to Elm, so it’s serialized which 
means there should not be any other changes to the Elm state while the 
editor is open. 😎

I’m guessing in time, there could come in more things like background 
sync-up of some kind, and then it’ll be really good to keep in mind these 
things that you’re mentioning about stale states. 🤓

Thank you! Really good catch! 👍

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