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I'm sure Elm is lovely, but how is it useful without a browser to deliver it, a browser to provide it a document to manipulate, and a browser to display its cha

I'm sure Elm is lovely, but how is it useful without a browser to deliver it, a browser to provide it a document to manipulate, and a browser to display its changes to that document? It's those things that are complex; the client-side programming language (if present) is just one of many, many high-complexity parts in a browser.

carapace 8y ago
Bless you! I was hoping someone would ask me that. TL;DR: Write an Elm to native app compiler/interpreter. Servers serve Elm code. (As an aside, The loveliness of Elm is incidental to the point. If it looked like COBOL it would still make economic sense. Lots of people have developed DSLs for apps, the important thing about Elm is that it's a very elegant and well-thought-out domain-specific system for specifying apps. Elm is much less complex than HTML+CSS+JS+Frameworks/libs/NPM etc.) At the moment, the delivery vehicle for Elm-specified apps is the Fractal Rube Goldberg Machine, yes. But consider e.g. an Elm-to-GTK compiler, or Elm-to-TCL/Tk interpreter, whatever... The FRBM is just a reasonable first target platform. I don't think I'm wrong here, or even saying anything controversial. Go look at what VPRI did with STEPS. Our code volume and complexity is too high by two or three orders of magnitude.
- sli 8y ago
  I don't see why I wouldn't just use Haskell and a native UI library right now, to similar effect, instead of waiting for all this to appear. The language is in a much more stable state than Elm, which already makes it more ideal in a business-context.
  - carapace 8y ago
    Cheers! You're making my point: the "FRBM" isn't needful.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - sli 8y ago
      I'm not making your point for you, I just don't agree with you on what the actual problem is. Programmers don't disagree that we could be using better approaches. The question is not why they don't exist, because they do exist. The question is why we don't or can't use them currently. Most of the time, the reason is purely cultural, either due to management or legacy. I'd love to use Purescript and Haskell at my job, but I cannot. I don't get to make that choice. A new Elm transpiler won't solve a cultural problem.

carapace 8y ago

Bless you! I was hoping someone would ask me that. TL;DR: Write an Elm to native app compiler/interpreter. Servers serve Elm code. (As an aside, The loveliness of Elm is incidental to the point. If it looked like COBOL it would still make economic sense. Lots of people have developed DSLs for apps, the important thing about Elm is that it's a very elegant and well-thought-out domain-specific system for specifying apps. Elm is much less complex than HTML+CSS+JS+Frameworks/libs/NPM etc.) At the moment, the delivery vehicle for Elm-specified apps is the Fractal Rube Goldberg Machine, yes. But consider e.g. an Elm-to-GTK compiler, or Elm-to-TCL/Tk interpreter, whatever... The FRBM is just a reasonable first target platform. I don't think I'm wrong here, or even saying anything controversial. Go look at what VPRI did with STEPS. Our code volume and complexity is too high by two or three orders of magnitude.

sli 8y ago
I don't see why I wouldn't just use Haskell and a native UI library right now, to similar effect, instead of waiting for all this to appear. The language is in a much more stable state than Elm, which already makes it more ideal in a business-context.
- carapace 8y ago
  Cheers! You're making my point: the "FRBM" isn't needful.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - sli 8y ago
    I'm not making your point for you, I just don't agree with you on what the actual problem is. Programmers don't disagree that we could be using better approaches. The question is not why they don't exist, because they do exist. The question is why we don't or can't use them currently. Most of the time, the reason is purely cultural, either due to management or legacy. I'd love to use Purescript and Haskell at my job, but I cannot. I don't get to make that choice. A new Elm transpiler won't solve a cultural problem.