3 ms·

Pretty much. I keep asking people "Why not Elm?" ( https://elm-lang.org/ https://elm-lang.org/ ) but no one has a very good answer. The weird thing to me is t

Pretty much. I keep asking people "Why not Elm?" ( https://elm-lang.org/ https://elm-lang.org/ ) but no one has a very good answer. The weird thing to me is that the two main customers or consumers of front-end programming (publishers and users) never see and do not care about the underlying language or implementation! Businesses and other orgs (schools, NGOs, etc.) as well as individuals (FB users, WordPress blogs, etc.) that publish sites/apps on the web and their visitors and users never see under the hood except when something goes wrong or they deliberately click "View Source", eh? Ergo, all this whole Javascript ecosystem is solely for the developers. It's like a giant and largely irrelevant MMORG that we play that produces mostly-working websites and apps almost as a side effect. "Change my mind?"

jmull 4y ago
The question is really “Why not Javascript, and if not, then why Elm?”
- carapace 4y ago
  Not Javascript because it's objectively a lousy language. (Imagine if Eich had been allowed to embed Scheme!? What a wonderful world that would be. I'm not going to look if there's a Scheme implemented in JS, I assume there is.) An interesting question is why Elm instead of Scheme-in-JS or Scheme-in-WASM? The answer is to that is also the answer to "Why Elm?" Elm is extremely user-friendly, domain-specific language that makes it nigh impossible to write buggy code. You can write code that does the wrong thing, but it will do it correctly. In practice, what this means is that Elm web apps have had zero front-end bugs. If we allow that end-users and management do not care what system we use to make the website "go", then it's pretty obvious that they could make do with a much cheaper solution than the JS ecosystem. Elm is so simple and easy that anybody can use it to maintain their own web sites or web apps.

jmull 4y ago

The question is really “Why not Javascript, and if not, then why Elm?”

carapace 4y ago
Not Javascript because it's objectively a lousy language. (Imagine if Eich had been allowed to embed Scheme!? What a wonderful world that would be. I'm not going to look if there's a Scheme implemented in JS, I assume there is.) An interesting question is why Elm instead of Scheme-in-JS or Scheme-in-WASM? The answer is to that is also the answer to "Why Elm?" Elm is extremely user-friendly, domain-specific language that makes it nigh impossible to write buggy code. You can write code that does the wrong thing, but it will do it correctly. In practice, what this means is that Elm web apps have had zero front-end bugs. If we allow that end-users and management do not care what system we use to make the website "go", then it's pretty obvious that they could make do with a much cheaper solution than the JS ecosystem. Elm is so simple and easy that anybody can use it to maintain their own web sites or web apps.