News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Elm at Rakuten by mwcampbell on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @02:18PM (#28225107)
> Good. The longer I do this, the longer I realize that unless your in a race-to-the-bottom industry (something like vying for eye balls to increase ad spend), then this is categorically a bad thing.

It's not that simple. I realize this may be uncommon, but it's possible to work on a product that is truly worthwhile, that improves peoples' lives, and whose target users urgently need a solution to the problem you're solving. I recently developed a product that I believe meets this description (I won't plug it here). I chose Elixir for the web application. While I think that's a defensible choice, given the real-time nature of the application, I sometimes wonder if I would have been better off choosing a more mainstream language -- one with an official Stripe client library, for one thing. Any day I spent unnecessarily reimplementing something because I chose Elixir is a day that the target users couldn't benefit from my product. And, bearing that in mind, I should get back to work.

Re:Elm at Rakuten by aszen on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @02:32PM (#28225311)
In a more mainstream language, while it may have a few Stripe client libraries but if your true use case of being real time isn't full filled then it makes no sense to choose them. A working stripe client takes at most a day to write, compared to years that can go in changing the architecture of your application
Re:Elm at Rakuten by WJW on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @04:44PM (#28226857)
If you have enough talent that a good quality Stripe integration takes only a day to write, bending Rails or Laravel to serve websockets is not going to take more than a few days to write either. The true pain of non-standard languages is not in having to implement any specific dependency yourself but in having to reimplement a few dozen trivial-but-not-easy things yourself. It's a death by a hundred small cuts.
Re:Elm at Rakuten by aszen on Thursday August 19, 2021 @06:51AM (#28232321)
On the one hand u r writing a wrapper over an already well specified rest api of stripe and on the other hand u need to modify a programming language runtime to be faster and reliable for real time operations. I'm not sure these tasks are really comparable in any way.

Choosing non-popular languages is a trade off yes but not as much as people think especially if you have a good team willing to learn them.

There are also benefits apart from technical ones like better job retention and attracting finer talent without having to filter hundreds of resumes. I will say if your business is made around hiring and making anyone work of the shelf then it's a bad idea.

Re:Elm at Rakuten by xupybd on Wednesday August 18, 2021 @11:03PM (#28229880)
I've worked on, and am working on projects that are dying because the libraries that were added are now out of date.

It gets really hard to maintain after 10 - 15 years. I wish we had rolled our own libraries for some of the simpler functions. Even in PHP this would have made life so much better.