4 ms·
It's astonishing how much category theory jargon is required to build a frickin wizard. Wizards could be made almost entirely in a GUI - double click a field or
by seertaak 6y ago
It's astonishing how much category theory jargon is required to build a frickin wizard. Wizards could be made almost entirely in a GUI - double click a field or button to associate code - way back when I started programming in the mid 90s. I really struggle to see how this is progress.
- yakshaving_jgt 6y agoCould you point out which part of the article uses "category theory jargon"?
- seertaak 6y agoThe whole part about lenses.
- yakshaving_jgt 6y agoThe use of lenses here is just one approach to solving a specific problem. It is still possible to write code with the same behaviour without lenses. Do you have a better suggestion for updating deeply-nested record fields?
- pyrale 6y agoStill lenses, but have you looked at https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/bChiquet/elm-accessors/ https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/bChiquet/elm-accessors...?
- yakshaving_jgt 6y agoI hadn't seen it until you linked to it from one of your earlier comments. I have no particular attachment to elm-monocle, and I appreciate you sharing :)
- ImprobableTruth 6y agoLenses are not a concept from category theory and to understand them no knowledge of category theory is required. Category theory just gives you generalizations (other 'optics') and better encodings, but none of that is mentioned in this post.
- rapind 6y agoI think it’s usually a state issue due to stateless HTTP. If you don’t care about recovering steps or entering mid step from existing data (routing) it’s still pretty straightforward IMO.
- imtringued 6y agoI used to think that the jargon is stupid. Nowadays I think it is just impractical and prone to abuse. Haskell (or Elm) is not going to become an industry language because the barrier is too high and people love building their tiny islands of expertise. Lowest common denominators are actually a feature of programming languages used by industry. It's why we have languages like Go or Javascript.
- yakshaving_jgt 6y ago> Haskell (or Elm) is not going to become an industry language I'm not really sure what this means. At Riskbook we have about 50,000 lines of Haskell and about 20,000 lines of Elm running in production. It's working great for us.
- hitekker 6y agoPrezi was the first major adopter of Elm in industry. They hired the language author to work on it full-time. A few years later, they laid him off and deprecated their Elm codebase.
- yakshaving_jgt 6y agoThat may be true (I'm not actually sure), but it's not at all clear to me why that matters. Elm won't be used in industry because the language designer used to work at a company and now he doesn't work there anymore? Perhaps I'm being obtuse, but this is a total non sequitur to me.
- sk5t 6y agoIt seems kind of... hubristic? for a company like Prezi to go out on a limb for an obscure language. Did they read PG's old essays about lisp and plan on repeating a fluke?
- hitekker 6y agoYep, vanity is the mark of the CTO who cares more about the elegance of their code, than the effectiveness of their business. Funnily enough, the next company that hired the maintainer and went all in on Elm makes even less money than Prezi and has even less of a name-brand.