10 ms·

Has anyone started a project with elm and continued it for a long time?

by pictur 7y ago

seddona 7y ago
Yep we build CircuitHub (YC startup) on Elm. I know quite a few companies that also have large Elm code bases.
- BozeWolf 7y ago
  The “example” is crashing my safari on iphone xs. Impressive product though. https://circuithub.com/projects/ti/TIDA-00230 https://circuithub.com/projects/ti/TIDA-00230
  - seddona 7y ago
    Thanks for the bug report, I'll let the dev team know! I wouldn't consider that a problem with Elm it's just that our users are mostly on desktop Chrome so we don't test very often on mobile Safari.
raxor53 7y ago
I know NoRedInk has a lot of Elm components; however, they employ Evan Czaplicki, who is the creator of the language.
- danpalmer 7y ago
  It’s worth noting that they first used Elm very extensively, then because of that they hired Evan to maintain the language there.
pyrale 7y ago
We have elm running in prod for about 2 years in my team, and our story has motivated a couple more teams to use it. Do you have specific questions ?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
BokuBeam 7y ago
We've used it pretty heavily at Drip for nearly two years now. It's been great for taking on some complex UI and making it maintainable.
icidasset 7y ago
If you're interested in an open-source project, I've been using Elm in https://github.com/icidasset/diffuse https://github.com/icidasset/diffuse for 2 and half years now.
- neillyons 7y ago
  Looks great!
Chadtech_Real 7y ago
I have been writing Elm for 5 years now. I work at Humio, where our front end is 100k lines of Elm code. What would you like to know? I love Elm. I'm absolutely hooked. I don't want to go back to doing Frontend work in JS, and I hope one day there can be an Elm-like experience for backend development as well. Just off the top of my head a few bits of what I like about Elm: - You can actually write code, have no errors, and then move on, and never return to the project again. When I was doing JS, everyone I knew just took it for granted that you would be maintaining everything you ever wrote for the rest of your career. Not with Elm! You can actually finish projects and never return to them. - Its a simple and small language that is designed to interact with human beings. The compiler really talks to you instead of spitting out error codes or spaghetti. Apis and variables have human readable names instead of mathy terms of symbols. - For everything theres one way of doing things and the one way is usually really good. This strong consensus orientation of the Elm community means everyone is speaking the same language about every problem. Gotta go, bye.
- excursionist 7y ago
  > I hope one day there can be an Elm-like experience for backend development as well. Haskell?
  - ronanyeah 7y ago
    Unfortunately there is a large gap between the developer experience of both ecosystems.
  - Chadtech_Real 7y ago
    They are pretty different. They have similar syntax, and their type systems are similarly strong, but beyond that they are pretty different. Haskell has a huge syntax and a ton of language features. It has a big ecosystem. Haskell is very mathy. Elm is the opposite in each of those regards.
- owl57 7y ago
  > You can actually finish projects and never return to them How do you manage that? Migrating from 0.18 to 0.19 wasn't hard in my limited experience, but it wasn't "finish and never return" either.
absynce 7y ago
I've worked on two (2) substantial production Elm applications. 1. Healthcare Fall 2017, I started integrating Elm into an AngularJS application after experimenting with it on a couple of side projects. After a successful initial feature, I convinced the team to use it for new features. Another couple of developers helped to create the initial version until late 2018. We started in Elm 0.18 and converted it to 0.19. Now a sole part-time college student maintains and adds new features to it. 2. Transportation management Since January 2019, I work on an Elm project, once again weaved into an existing AngularJS app, with ~34k lines of Elm code. I inherited it with no interaction from the previous developer. It looks like it was introduced in mid-2017 and is currently on Elm 0.19. Although it is not perfect, not always following best practices, it is much easier to maintain than anything I've worked on in the past. On JS apps, I've torn my hair out trying to figure out what is going on and attempting to add new features. With Elm, I refactor daringly and rest more easily. Please let me know if you have any specific questions.
- Scarbutt 7y ago
  Since January 2019, I work on an Elm project, once again weaved into an existing AngularJS app, with ~34k lines of Elm code. Watching a simple example in the elm website, the codes make judicious use of new lines, would you say those 34k lines would represent 17K in js?
  - jxxcarlson 7y ago
    Yes, something like that. Almost everyone who writes Elm code uses elm-format which is very "spacey". So foo = 1 is formatted with foo = on one line and 1 on the next, with some leading space.
auslegung 7y ago
ITPro.TV is using Elm to build all their new dynamic frontends, and is refactoring their legacy app using Elm.
ronanyeah 7y ago
Been using Elm exclusively for 2 years. Many projects of different sizes. Very pleased with it.
augustin82 7y ago
We've been using it in production since the end of 2015. We have two main products whose front-end is written entirely in Elm, a third one in development, totalling about 80k loc. It's a blast, it's a wonderful developer experience, it's changed my life as a developer after having to fight with Angular and React and the myriad of tools you need to use to have a decent experience. It would be difficult for me to consider a position where I would not use Elm anymore, and if I did it would have to satiate my thirst for functional programming by letting me work with other cool similar languages.
mjaniczek 7y ago
Yeah, our work frontends are done in Elm, my side-project SaaS is done in Elm, etc. The maintainability is fantastic. Do you have more specific questions / concerns?
- Scarbutt 7y ago
  Is ELM a good fit for non-SPAs web apps?
Bastes 7y ago
Been suggesting we use it for a complicated bit of interface for a company I was working at two years ago, we were pleasantly surprised at how well it held both in requiring low (almost no) maintenance once written and how easy it was to improve on the codebase. We migrated pretty easily from 0.18 to 0.19, we only had to import a bit of code here and there from libs that would not migrate or update where changes had been made, strong typing and the compiler made it a rather pleasant experience. The only thing we did not do was migrate to an SPA ; the scope of the app was wide and the cost to achieve this was too high I guess. Few pain points, amongst which: - Sometimes you have to do something you would expect to find off-the-shelf (like a souped-up drop-down or a tag editing system) but it's ususally a matter of designing your ui well and can be fun (plus you get to really design the user experience). - Sometimes you have to do a bit of JS for stuff that aren't designed in Elm (anymore, ie websockets) and use ports to communicate. - If you're building incrementally, and make mistakes (over-design, useless code to conform to an unrequired philosophy, etc.) it's a good thing to sometimes challenge the bad old choices and get them smoothed down ; thankfully the compiler is your friend here too. - The learning curve, especially if your team isn't fond of functional programming, can be daunting if you don't have an Elm advocate. That was me in my team, and we grew fond of it, but made quite a few beginners mistakes on the way. All very fixable though. Well, that's about it ; if you want help getting people started and boosted on the functional programming paradigm, please have a look at my blog: it's Elm-centric, focusing on the most important functional programming concepts that'll get you up and running on what's happening there :) https://medium.com/wat-the-elm-ist https://medium.com/wat-the-elm-ist And it might even explain what monads are ;)
jweir 7y ago
We have been using for about 3 years now. Myself and the two other devs enjoy working in it more than the other languages we use (Ruby, Go and vanilla JS). Upgrades have been pretty painless, and each new release brings a new level of ease of use. We have made some architectural mistakes as we have learned the language. And since it is a newer language there are not as many established conventions for code organization – but we are figuring out.
jxxcarlson 7y ago
I wrote a library that parses a subset of LaTeX and renders it as HTML. See https://demo.minilatex.app/ https://demo.minilatex.app/ or more at https://minilatex.io https://minilatex.io I was astonished by what is possible to do with Elm. This is a continuing project. It is easy to go back to the code even after leaving it untouched for several months. I've engaged in "extreme refactoring" many times. No fears! I've also written a bunch of small mathy apps, e.g. https://jxxcarlson.io/apps/ https://jxxcarlson.io/apps/ Elm has been a joy to work with.
cc-cpo 7y ago
How about cross mobile apps (ionic/cordova)?
- akoppela 7y ago
  I developed mobile app on Elm with Cordova. Works great. Will be published to store soon.
mordrax 7y ago
I've had a hobby game in Elm which I worked on for about a year and a half and I was the second engineer ( frontend lead ) hired to 'rescue' a greenfield project with Elm as the frontend. That is now at 100k+ LOC, 2.5 years later. Our team has grown from 3 to 9, we have 3 frontend devs all writing in Elm and looking for our 4th. The company now has 4 production projects with Elm as the sole frontend tech.
danabrams 7y ago
I've used Elm for frontend pretty much exclusively since 2016. In the last two months I changed jobs and now write a bunch of typescript, and it's fine, but would much prefer to be writing elm...I mean, I'm only working on backend right now, but still...
- dorian-graph 7y ago
  I'm curious about why you prefer Elm over TypeScript, as both are statically typed
philh 7y ago
We've been using it for almost two years. I wrote this just after the 0.19 release and still stand by it; I wouldn't start a project in Elm again until I'd explored more options (in particular purescript). https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/992qe5/elm_019_released/e4kncds?context=1 https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/992qe5/elm_019...

Has anyone started a project with elm and continued it for a long time?

by pictur 7y ago

Has anyone started a project with elm and continued it for a long time?

seddona 7y ago

Yep we build CircuitHub (YC startup) on Elm. I know quite a few companies that also have large Elm code bases.

BozeWolf 7y ago
The “example” is crashing my safari on iphone xs. Impressive product though. https://circuithub.com/projects/ti/TIDA-00230 https://circuithub.com/projects/ti/TIDA-00230
- seddona 7y ago
  Thanks for the bug report, I'll let the dev team know! I wouldn't consider that a problem with Elm it's just that our users are mostly on desktop Chrome so we don't test very often on mobile Safari.

raxor53 7y ago

I know NoRedInk has a lot of Elm components; however, they employ Evan Czaplicki, who is the creator of the language.

danpalmer 7y ago
It’s worth noting that they first used Elm very extensively, then because of that they hired Evan to maintain the language there.

pyrale 7y ago

We have elm running in prod for about 2 years in my team, and our story has motivated a couple more teams to use it. Do you have specific questions ?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

BokuBeam 7y ago

We've used it pretty heavily at Drip for nearly two years now. It's been great for taking on some complex UI and making it maintainable.

icidasset 7y ago

If you're interested in an open-source project, I've been using Elm in https://github.com/icidasset/diffuse https://github.com/icidasset/diffuse for 2 and half years now.

neillyons 7y ago
Looks great!

Chadtech_Real 7y ago

I have been writing Elm for 5 years now. I work at Humio, where our front end is 100k lines of Elm code. What would you like to know? I love Elm. I'm absolutely hooked. I don't want to go back to doing Frontend work in JS, and I hope one day there can be an Elm-like experience for backend development as well. Just off the top of my head a few bits of what I like about Elm: - You can actually write code, have no errors, and then move on, and never return to the project again. When I was doing JS, everyone I knew just took it for granted that you would be maintaining everything you ever wrote for the rest of your career. Not with Elm! You can actually finish projects and never return to them. - Its a simple and small language that is designed to interact with human beings. The compiler really talks to you instead of spitting out error codes or spaghetti. Apis and variables have human readable names instead of mathy terms of symbols. - For everything theres one way of doing things and the one way is usually really good. This strong consensus orientation of the Elm community means everyone is speaking the same language about every problem. Gotta go, bye.

excursionist 7y ago
> I hope one day there can be an Elm-like experience for backend development as well. Haskell?
- ronanyeah 7y ago
  Unfortunately there is a large gap between the developer experience of both ecosystems.
- Chadtech_Real 7y ago
  They are pretty different. They have similar syntax, and their type systems are similarly strong, but beyond that they are pretty different. Haskell has a huge syntax and a ton of language features. It has a big ecosystem. Haskell is very mathy. Elm is the opposite in each of those regards.
owl57 7y ago
> You can actually finish projects and never return to them How do you manage that? Migrating from 0.18 to 0.19 wasn't hard in my limited experience, but it wasn't "finish and never return" either.

absynce 7y ago

I've worked on two (2) substantial production Elm applications. 1. Healthcare Fall 2017, I started integrating Elm into an AngularJS application after experimenting with it on a couple of side projects. After a successful initial feature, I convinced the team to use it for new features. Another couple of developers helped to create the initial version until late 2018. We started in Elm 0.18 and converted it to 0.19. Now a sole part-time college student maintains and adds new features to it. 2. Transportation management Since January 2019, I work on an Elm project, once again weaved into an existing AngularJS app, with ~34k lines of Elm code. I inherited it with no interaction from the previous developer. It looks like it was introduced in mid-2017 and is currently on Elm 0.19. Although it is not perfect, not always following best practices, it is much easier to maintain than anything I've worked on in the past. On JS apps, I've torn my hair out trying to figure out what is going on and attempting to add new features. With Elm, I refactor daringly and rest more easily. Please let me know if you have any specific questions.

Scarbutt 7y ago
Since January 2019, I work on an Elm project, once again weaved into an existing AngularJS app, with ~34k lines of Elm code. Watching a simple example in the elm website, the codes make judicious use of new lines, would you say those 34k lines would represent 17K in js?
- jxxcarlson 7y ago
  Yes, something like that. Almost everyone who writes Elm code uses elm-format which is very "spacey". So foo = 1 is formatted with foo = on one line and 1 on the next, with some leading space.

auslegung 7y ago

ITPro.TV is using Elm to build all their new dynamic frontends, and is refactoring their legacy app using Elm.

ronanyeah 7y ago

Been using Elm exclusively for 2 years. Many projects of different sizes. Very pleased with it.

augustin82 7y ago

We've been using it in production since the end of 2015. We have two main products whose front-end is written entirely in Elm, a third one in development, totalling about 80k loc. It's a blast, it's a wonderful developer experience, it's changed my life as a developer after having to fight with Angular and React and the myriad of tools you need to use to have a decent experience. It would be difficult for me to consider a position where I would not use Elm anymore, and if I did it would have to satiate my thirst for functional programming by letting me work with other cool similar languages.

mjaniczek 7y ago

Yeah, our work frontends are done in Elm, my side-project SaaS is done in Elm, etc. The maintainability is fantastic. Do you have more specific questions / concerns?

Scarbutt 7y ago
Is ELM a good fit for non-SPAs web apps?

Bastes 7y ago

Been suggesting we use it for a complicated bit of interface for a company I was working at two years ago, we were pleasantly surprised at how well it held both in requiring low (almost no) maintenance once written and how easy it was to improve on the codebase. We migrated pretty easily from 0.18 to 0.19, we only had to import a bit of code here and there from libs that would not migrate or update where changes had been made, strong typing and the compiler made it a rather pleasant experience. The only thing we did not do was migrate to an SPA ; the scope of the app was wide and the cost to achieve this was too high I guess. Few pain points, amongst which: - Sometimes you have to do something you would expect to find off-the-shelf (like a souped-up drop-down or a tag editing system) but it's ususally a matter of designing your ui well and can be fun (plus you get to really design the user experience). - Sometimes you have to do a bit of JS for stuff that aren't designed in Elm (anymore, ie websockets) and use ports to communicate. - If you're building incrementally, and make mistakes (over-design, useless code to conform to an unrequired philosophy, etc.) it's a good thing to sometimes challenge the bad old choices and get them smoothed down ; thankfully the compiler is your friend here too. - The learning curve, especially if your team isn't fond of functional programming, can be daunting if you don't have an Elm advocate. That was me in my team, and we grew fond of it, but made quite a few beginners mistakes on the way. All very fixable though. Well, that's about it ; if you want help getting people started and boosted on the functional programming paradigm, please have a look at my blog: it's Elm-centric, focusing on the most important functional programming concepts that'll get you up and running on what's happening there :) https://medium.com/wat-the-elm-ist https://medium.com/wat-the-elm-ist And it might even explain what monads are ;)

jweir 7y ago

We have been using for about 3 years now. Myself and the two other devs enjoy working in it more than the other languages we use (Ruby, Go and vanilla JS). Upgrades have been pretty painless, and each new release brings a new level of ease of use. We have made some architectural mistakes as we have learned the language. And since it is a newer language there are not as many established conventions for code organization – but we are figuring out.

jxxcarlson 7y ago

I wrote a library that parses a subset of LaTeX and renders it as HTML. See https://demo.minilatex.app/ https://demo.minilatex.app/ or more at https://minilatex.io https://minilatex.io I was astonished by what is possible to do with Elm. This is a continuing project. It is easy to go back to the code even after leaving it untouched for several months. I've engaged in "extreme refactoring" many times. No fears! I've also written a bunch of small mathy apps, e.g. https://jxxcarlson.io/apps/ https://jxxcarlson.io/apps/ Elm has been a joy to work with.

cc-cpo 7y ago

How about cross mobile apps (ionic/cordova)?

akoppela 7y ago
I developed mobile app on Elm with Cordova. Works great. Will be published to store soon.

mordrax 7y ago

I've had a hobby game in Elm which I worked on for about a year and a half and I was the second engineer ( frontend lead ) hired to 'rescue' a greenfield project with Elm as the frontend. That is now at 100k+ LOC, 2.5 years later. Our team has grown from 3 to 9, we have 3 frontend devs all writing in Elm and looking for our 4th. The company now has 4 production projects with Elm as the sole frontend tech.

danabrams 7y ago

I've used Elm for frontend pretty much exclusively since 2016. In the last two months I changed jobs and now write a bunch of typescript, and it's fine, but would much prefer to be writing elm...I mean, I'm only working on backend right now, but still...

dorian-graph 7y ago
I'm curious about why you prefer Elm over TypeScript, as both are statically typed

philh 7y ago

We've been using it for almost two years. I wrote this just after the 0.19 release and still stand by it; I wouldn't start a project in Elm again until I'd explored more options (in particular purescript). https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/992qe5/elm_019_released/e4kncds?context=1 https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/992qe5/elm_019...