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by pka 3505 days ago
You seem to miss the point.

Elm is particularly easy to pick up for people coming from Haskell. Maybe not in 15 seconds, but 15 minutes is a totally reasonable estimate.

The author can without doubt write a large project in Elm. His complaints were about missing the conveniences of abstraction Haskell-like languages provide, and he is more than qualified to talk about it.

Decomposing records into tuples of comparables has probably crossed his mind :)

1 comments

>15 minutes is a totally reasonable estimate [coming from Haskell]. The author can without doubt write a large project in Elm.

Well, all right. In general I would say that is not true even for languages that are close, but there are exceptions and I suppose I can take your word for it.

It's only because Elm is basic Haskell minus a lot of stuff. So basically if you know Haskell you already know Elm (so you need the 15 minutes to get up to speed wrt ports and subscriptions or whatever), but at the same time miss the stuff that has been left out that you take for granted, hence the failed attempt of the author to get some of that back.
That could have been presented much more clearly in the article.

It would be interesting to compare with the opinion/experience of someone who didn't know Haskell, well, right? (Though in that case perhaps the learning curve is too steep, maybe Elm isn't meant for that.)

Actually, that's the thing: Elm is designed for people who don't know Haskell. It's designed for JavaScript developers who are attracted by the "no runtime exceptions" claim.

If you're coming from Haskell, you'll see Elm as a dumbed down, stripped version of Haskell, which will trigger in you the feelings it triggered in the OP.

Thanks. The chances we'll hear the perspective from a javascript dev with no haskell exp are slim though.
Join the Slack elm channel. You'll find them there.