[logicallee]

So is it fair to say that it is possible for me to conclude "xyz is broken" based on a single paragraph? For example, if I read the Wikipedia article on Perl 6, the second paragraph says "While historically several interpreter and compiler implementations were being written, today only the Rakudo Perl implementation is in active development."

So let me skip the part where I spend 2 weeks picking up a language!

Let's go straight to: "if an ostensibly open language only has one single implementation, it is fundamentally broken and underspecified and should not be used by anyone, period."

Is the part I quoted enough for me to conclucde that it's a broken language not fit for any use by anyone? Because the article that we're talking about has the title "Elm is wrong."

Can I say, "Perl 6 is wrong" without even bothering with coding in it for a few months?

[windwake12]

"Elm is Wrong" is a good click-baity title. It's not out-right lying, but opinionated sure. It leads me to want to know in what way it's "Wrong", somehow broken fundamentals, stupid API, bad implementation, or what have you.

Given the response in this thread, I can only surmise it was a well chosen title for a blog post.

[logicallee]

But HN has an explicit policy against clickbait titles, and usually edits them to be more descriptive.

[mikekchar]

Having a single implementation is quite a different situation than having a missing feature that most people would consider necessary.

A better example would be back in the old days perl had no intrinsic OO support. Instead it had a library that made a few things easier. But basically, the OO support was hashes that pointed to functions. There was no syntactic sugar at all.

As an OO language Perl was fundamentally broken. You could still write OO code in Perl (and I happily did so for a very long time). But, yes, there were many people who claimed that Perl should be avoided because of this. Eventually full OO support was added and those voices died down.

The difference between that situation and this situation is that the author of Elm (as I understand it) has absolutely no intention of adding type classes to Elm. He has specifically chosen not to have them because he thinks it complicates the language. I happen to think that for his target audience, he is absolutely right. I think it is a good decision.

However, for the author of the blog post, the decision is wrong. Elm is intentionally broken. The author does not want to fix it and the blog post author thinks that this decision is wrong.

He also complains about the maximum size of tuples. The author of Elm believes that you should only have small tuples because you should be using records instead. This is contrary to how FP languages tend to work. Usually you use tuples. Records are the strange structure to work with. Again, I agree with the author of Elm, but the author of the blog post has a completely valid point. In his opinion, Elm is wrong.

The author of the blog post found a way to get around several of the problems he was having with Elm, but it required him to add or remove fields in records. The author of Elm had disabled that feature because it was complicated. Given that doing this removes the only way the blog post author (and me too) has to work around the lack of type classes, he was upset. Even though I understand the blog post author's frustration, I agree with Elm's author. JS implementations are optimised for objects that don't change structure. Records are implemented with JS objects and so allowing the records to change structure will impact performance in ways that the Elm programmer won't expect. It's a pity, but shit happens. Of course the blog post author thinks this is wrong.

Finally, it's not like you are locked down here. You can easily write an extension in JS to fix the issues the blog post writer has. But the kicker is that JS extensions can not be distributed with the normal Elm tools without approval from Elm's author. And Elm's author has said that he doesn't want those things fixed. So even if you wrote a work around, you aren't allowed to distribute it.

So given all this, I hope you can see the blog post author's point. Elm is fundamentally broken. The Elm's author knows that is broken and refuses to fix it. The only way inside the language to work around the broken feature was removed and Elm's author doesn't care. You could fix the problem by writing an extension, but Elm's author has blocked that avenue as well. You are not allowed to fix this problem.

This is what he feels is wrong. I completely understand his point of view, even if I disagree with his conclusion. Your characterisation of the situation trivialises it. You assume that there is no way the blog post author can know what he is talking about because he hasn't used the language long enough. You haven't spent the time yourself to understand what the issue is and why the blog post author is upset. You just assume he is a dumb ass. That's why you were getting voted down.

I spent a lot of time trying to explain the situation to you, so I hope at some point you find it valuable (even if it doesn't seem so right now). Like I said, sometimes I get the impression that spending my time on things like this is worth it. In my past, some people have graciously spent similar efforts to help me understand something and eventually it was helpful to me. I hope that will be the case here.