4 ms·

> But than again, Elm is not too easy. This means that almost every developer I see that is already involved in Elm is a seasoned developer. Getting experienced

by petetnt 10y ago

> But than again, Elm is not too easy. This means that almost every developer I see that is already involved in Elm is a seasoned developer. Getting experienced developers on board means that they are immediately productive, which means we gain more per hour. Not really seeing this as a strong point. It feels like the same mindset that drove me away from Scala (and many others [0]!). Sure, it might be good for the company in short term, but what happens when you run out of experienced Elm developers? At least Elm fairs fairly better with having usable samples on their own (clean) site. [0] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/scala-internals/r2GnzCFc3TY https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/scala-internals/r2Gn...

skybrian 10y ago
I don't think he's saying that Elm is actually hard to learn (like Scala or Haskell).
- kod 10y ago
  Yup, Elm isn't actually hard to learn. Nor is Scala (I had a team of people productive with it in under 2 weeks, with no significant prior FP experience).
jlarocco 10y ago
My interpretation of that sentence was that it's easy for developers familiar with other languages to pick up Elm, but less easy for people with little or no experience what-so-ever. I think he was contrasting with languages like Haskell and Scala, where even people very experienced with other languages have a hard time picking them up.
swsieber 10y ago
You hire experienced developers. Then you teach them Elm.
bcheung 10y ago
I looked around at Elm a little bit recently. I use React/Redux daily at work and have been learning Haskell on the side. When I took another pass at Elm it was extremely easy to pick up. I was able to skim through the docs super fast and start writing real code in about 15 minutes. I noticed myself typing Haskell code a bunch of the time and wondering why it didn't work though. For me, the hardest part in Elm, and Haskell as well, is figuring out how to structure data that is composition in nature or that involve Union types that are records. I can never quite seem to get the dereferencing right.

by petetnt 10y ago

skybrian 10y ago

I don't think he's saying that Elm is actually hard to learn (like Scala or Haskell).

kod 10y ago
Yup, Elm isn't actually hard to learn. Nor is Scala (I had a team of people productive with it in under 2 weeks, with no significant prior FP experience).

jlarocco 10y ago

My interpretation of that sentence was that it's easy for developers familiar with other languages to pick up Elm, but less easy for people with little or no experience what-so-ever. I think he was contrasting with languages like Haskell and Scala, where even people very experienced with other languages have a hard time picking them up.

swsieber 10y ago

You hire experienced developers. Then you teach them Elm.

bcheung 10y ago

I looked around at Elm a little bit recently. I use React/Redux daily at work and have been learning Haskell on the side. When I took another pass at Elm it was extremely easy to pick up. I was able to skim through the docs super fast and start writing real code in about 15 minutes. I noticed myself typing Haskell code a bunch of the time and wondering why it didn't work though. For me, the hardest part in Elm, and Haskell as well, is figuring out how to structure data that is composition in nature or that involve Union types that are records. I can never quite seem to get the dereferencing right.