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Fun project! I really resonate with this part > But I haven’t used Haskell in years, and the overhead for me to add slightly more complex things to the site is

Fun project! I really resonate with this part > But I haven’t used Haskell in years, and the overhead for me to add slightly more complex things to the site is quite large I’m starting to come around to the idea that it might be better to avoid shiny fun things in favor of having most of my active projects use the same stack, or at least the same few languages. I’ve got a blog in Jekyll (with some Ruby-based customizations), a bunch of stuff in JavaScript, some TypeScript, an app in Elixir & Phoenix, a (desktop) app in Rust, and some Rails to maintain. For me personally, Elixir is the odd one out: I learned enough to build that app, and I really enjoyed Elixir, but that knowledge was fleeting because I haven’t needed to touch the code very much. I have to relearn how Phoenix works in order to make changes. As much as it pains me to say this, I kind of wish it was in TypeScript or something, just to reduce the mental overhead. (but then, that’s a whole other can of worms because of how piecemeal things are in the Node ecosystem, so I’d end up having to learn a web framework and an ORM and some other libraries, which feels like the sort of knowledge that might be even more fleeting!)

zelphirkalt 4y ago
> As much as it pains me to say this, I kind of wish it was in TypeScript or something, just to reduce the mental overhead. If you once knew how Elixir works (syntactically), then you will be able to quickly bounce back. If comparing TypeScript with Phoenix, then you would have to relearn your in TS written functionality, in contrast to relearning Phoenix. I don't see how it being TS would help much tbh. I think what matters much more is, whether your past self left good comments and wrote readable code.
benreesman 4y ago
There’s a lot of wisdom in that observation. Knowing a lot of languages well is a super-power in some ways, but heavily polyglot environments create real pragmatic challenges. There’s a reason so many marquee shops carefully curate a (short) menu of production languages. It’s been my experience that if (and it’s a big if) you have either the need or inclination to operate a big orgy of polyglot language interop, the hellacious learning curves on NixOS and Bazel are “The Way”. It’s a big investment and only worth it if you’re pretty committed/obligated, but there is a path for those whose needs justify the cost.

zelphirkalt 4y ago

> As much as it pains me to say this, I kind of wish it was in TypeScript or something, just to reduce the mental overhead. If you once knew how Elixir works (syntactically), then you will be able to quickly bounce back. If comparing TypeScript with Phoenix, then you would have to relearn your in TS written functionality, in contrast to relearning Phoenix. I don't see how it being TS would help much tbh. I think what matters much more is, whether your past self left good comments and wrote readable code.

benreesman 4y ago

There’s a lot of wisdom in that observation. Knowing a lot of languages well is a super-power in some ways, but heavily polyglot environments create real pragmatic challenges. There’s a reason so many marquee shops carefully curate a (short) menu of production languages. It’s been my experience that if (and it’s a big if) you have either the need or inclination to operate a big orgy of polyglot language interop, the hellacious learning curves on NixOS and Bazel are “The Way”. It’s a big investment and only worth it if you’re pretty committed/obligated, but there is a path for those whose needs justify the cost.