Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web front end from React (2019)

Re:Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web front end from... by jrvarela56 on Thursday February 29, 2024 @08:28AM (#39549011)

I tried Elm in ~2018 and it was delightful. Ended up checking it out bc it was mentioned as 'prior art' in Redux's website. Didn't end up adopting bc everyone around me thought I was crazy to use something so niche.

It's the kind of thing that even if you don't end up using, you come out with lessons that make you a better programmer. Some that I remember:

- The compiler was fast, it made me aware that you could have an iterative workflow like most dynamic languages but driven by types

- The language/framework constructs (views, updates, etc) made it clear what kind of functionality had to live where so it makes me aware to define roles/arch in React apps that are 'just components'

- Error messages are just awesome, it was the clearest I had seen at that point and made me realize other languages just haven't paid enough attention to make them more usable

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Re:Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web front end from... by busfahrer on Thursday February 29, 2024 @09:04AM (#39549413)

> It's the kind of thing that even if you don't end up using, you come out with lessons that make you a better programmer.

Sort of a modern front-end developer's version of reading SICP even if you're not going to end up coding in Lisp, but because it makes you a better programmer, as you say. Interesting take!

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Re:Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web front end from... by ilikeorangutans on Thursday February 29, 2024 @08:56AM (#39549324)

Agree on all points. It's delightful to compile your app and... it just works. No nulls.

I still use it for personal projects where 8 can but Elm is showing its age. Newer JavaScript APIs are not well supported and ports, while I understand why they exist, can be painful to use.

But I'd still recommend it. Way more fun than any other fronted framework library I've used and the functional nature was a fun challenge for me.

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Re:Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web front end from... by hombre_fatal on Thursday February 29, 2024 @09:05AM (#39549427)

I still use Elm for personal projects as well. It’s nice to come back to an old project and become immediately productive not just because of the type system but because all Elm apps work the same.

Coming back to an old React app is usually a pain because everything changes between projects, even the state management architecture.

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Re:Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web front end from... by _raul on Thursday February 29, 2024 @09:00AM (#39549379)

Exactly the same delightful experience here. Sadly it’s only become an even harder sell since then.

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Re:Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web front end from... by cyberpunk on Thursday February 29, 2024 @09:44AM (#39549937)

Every single place I've worked that adopted it has like one or two elm repos left where no one has had the time to rewrite it into ts yet, and there's maybe one developer who still understands it.

I've not seen anyone picking it for new dev in... a really long time.

Shame, really.

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Re:Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web front end from... by boxed on Thursday February 29, 2024 @10:12AM (#39550378)

I use it at work. I tried to write Vue once and just hated it with a passion, so rewrote that part in Elm and was much happier.

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