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> It doesn't take "a few weeks" to learn a programming language!!! No, it doesn't. It takes a few hours. Which, I'm sure sounds flippant, but hear me out. I

> It doesn't take "a few weeks" to learn a programming language!!! No, it doesn't. It takes a few hours. Which, I'm sure sounds flippant, but hear me out. In the 25-30 years I've been a professional programmer, I've been paid to use many different languages. FORTH, Fortran, C, C++, Pascal, Protel, C#, Java, Perl, Ruby, Go, Javascript/Coffeescript, and Python are the ones that come off the top of my head, but if I were to go through my CV, I'd definitely remember a few more. Anyone who has programmed in a handful of the above will notice that (with the exception of FORTH) these languages are practically identical. They all have slightly different features and slightly different syntax, but once you know one, you can pick up another one pretty easily. Especially once you know 5 or 6 of them, you practically don't even need to look at the docs. Just glance at some example code and you are on your way. Libraries and frameworks take a lot more time than languages. There are lots of crazy details that you have to remember. Luckily, most of the major languages of the same type have very similar base libraries. As long as you stay away from frameworks, you can be productive pretty much immediately. Learning the details can take a few weeks, but mostly its unimportant. Frameworks suck. I've been working in Rails on and off for... 4 years???? I'll never put that damn thing on my CV. I still don't understand how it works. So, I don't know this author, but he is clearly knowledgeable in Haskell. Maybe he also knows Ocaml. It would take you about 15 seconds to pick up Elm from that background. The rest is discovering (and apparently complaining) about the bits that don't live up to your expectations. He didn't comment on the state of the libraries (except to complain about the political process for getting libraries distributed with the official tools). I'm not going to defend his rant. I didn't enjoy the tone and I think he completely misses the point of why the language is there. But his technical complaints are perfectly reasonable. I didn't vote you down, but I suspect the reason other people did is that you are a bit too quick to criticise the author's ability to accurately judge the language. He seems perfectly capable, even if I disagree with his conclusions and his tone.

logicallee 10y ago
So my point was actually about the specifics of picking up a language to do a new project, and then complaining about it. (Hence my example of writing a serious book in a language you don't know.) I think you really go into superlatives here. It's not fair for you to say "15 seconds", for example. 15 seconds is how long you've been reading this comment. (I just timed myself, okay maybe 10-13 seconds.) I also think that "a few hours" is an exaggeration on your part. Let's pick a language you've never used - take Objective-C which is similar to C# and C, C++ which you've already listed, and I think you've never programmed in it, because if you had you would probably have listed it. Okay, so now make a serious iOS app in Objective-C in "a few hours". As in, have one by this time tomorrow. See? It's crazy. That's not how it works. Maybe the weeks and months and decades run together for you, but there is a huge difference between doing something for a few months or a year, or doing something for a couple of weeks as our author reports. I don't like his kind of blog posts, and it is a whole category - there is this whole type of blog post where you pick something you've never used, use it to do something new, and then complain about it, all within the space of your first week or two using it. It strikes me as kind of ridiculous. Especially with a provocative title like "Elm is wrong." Literally, it's like Tolstoy writing War and Peace in Swahili, a language he didn't know, and then writing a blog post "Swahili is wrong" -- all within the space of two weeks of when he first learned Swahili. I might be exaggerating slightly, but I think my analogy holds. It's almost farcical.
- mmarx 10y ago
  > Okay, so now make a serious iOS app in Objective-C in "a few hours". As in, have one by this time tomorrow. See? It's crazy. That's not how it works. But then making an iOS app requires picking up frameworks/libraries, not only learning Objective C, which was exactly GP's point: >> Libraries and frameworks take a lot more time than languages.
  - logicallee 10y ago
    From the article: "Unfortunately, Elm isn’t a library. It’s a language, which just happens to have a great library" I don't know why we're arguing about this. It's another blog poster writing about something new they tried for one particular project, and in this case literally "why it's wrong". (After two weeks.) It's hard to take seriously.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- pka 10y 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 :)
  - logicallee 10y ago
    >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.
    - 10y ago

logicallee 10y ago

So my point was actually about the specifics of picking up a language to do a new project, and then complaining about it. (Hence my example of writing a serious book in a language you don't know.) I think you really go into superlatives here. It's not fair for you to say "15 seconds", for example. 15 seconds is how long you've been reading this comment. (I just timed myself, okay maybe 10-13 seconds.) I also think that "a few hours" is an exaggeration on your part. Let's pick a language you've never used - take Objective-C which is similar to C# and C, C++ which you've already listed, and I think you've never programmed in it, because if you had you would probably have listed it. Okay, so now make a serious iOS app in Objective-C in "a few hours". As in, have one by this time tomorrow. See? It's crazy. That's not how it works. Maybe the weeks and months and decades run together for you, but there is a huge difference between doing something for a few months or a year, or doing something for a couple of weeks as our author reports. I don't like his kind of blog posts, and it is a whole category - there is this whole type of blog post where you pick something you've never used, use it to do something new, and then complain about it, all within the space of your first week or two using it. It strikes me as kind of ridiculous. Especially with a provocative title like "Elm is wrong." Literally, it's like Tolstoy writing War and Peace in Swahili, a language he didn't know, and then writing a blog post "Swahili is wrong" -- all within the space of two weeks of when he first learned Swahili. I might be exaggerating slightly, but I think my analogy holds. It's almost farcical.

mmarx 10y ago
> Okay, so now make a serious iOS app in Objective-C in "a few hours". As in, have one by this time tomorrow. See? It's crazy. That's not how it works. But then making an iOS app requires picking up frameworks/libraries, not only learning Objective C, which was exactly GP's point: >> Libraries and frameworks take a lot more time than languages.
- logicallee 10y ago
  From the article: "Unfortunately, Elm isn’t a library. It’s a language, which just happens to have a great library" I don't know why we're arguing about this. It's another blog poster writing about something new they tried for one particular project, and in this case literally "why it's wrong". (After two weeks.) It's hard to take seriously.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
pka 10y 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 :)
- logicallee 10y ago
  >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.
  - 10y ago