4 ms·

What is the point of changes like [] to List, mod to %, . to << and >>? Is it just aesthetics? When I looked at Elm it was really similar to Haskell. After I l

• fallat 12y ago
  Yes, aesthetics. Here is another one: : and :: are reversed. They have no intention of making them more similar- in fact I was told there is going to be more subtle diverging happening. Elm was really cool for me too at first, but these subtleties are just a pain. I am now using haste (haste-lang.org), which seems to have really come a long way over the course of its 3 year life span. I highly recommend it to those wanting to use Haskell as a front-end web development language.
  • rnhmjoj 12y ago
    Wow, haste is great. Thank you for sharing.
  • throwaway77221 12y ago
    Completely agree. Not only these subtle changes but also the Evan's resistance to include common typeclasses and generally anti-intellectual attitude and rudeness have turned me off completely. Evan also plays favorites a lot and has a rather naive view of social justice (which he views himself as some kind of champion for). Purescript has now become my alternative but I will take a look at Haste (ghcjs may be another possibility to look into).
  • throwaway19283 12y ago
    Oh, yes, reversing : and :: makes it soooooo much easier for beginners to approach. The elm community is full of inane bikeshedding like this. I bet they spent days and even weeks arguing the merits of reversing these vs not reversing them.
• corysama 12y ago
  Personally, I am overjoyed that Elm is taking steps to make it's aesthetics more approachable to the non-Haskell crowd. Haskell is wonderful, but it has a learning curve that is steep enough to ward off the vast majority of programmers. A big part of the curve is that Haskell has a vocabulary that presumes a familiarity with decades of research that frankly only a very small population is familiar with. In that context, I'm sure "lift" made sense for the Elm thesis. But, without that context, "map" makes a lot more sense to me and to a lot more people. I'm hopeful that Elm will help bring Haskell's ideas to a wider audience. After those ideas become familiar, I fully expect a large crowd of them to find Haskell's highly efficient syntax for expressing them to be very enticing. But, getting people to that point is going to require a lot of considerations to ease the JavaScripter -> Elmer -> Haskeller transformation.
  • rnhmjoj 12y ago
    Yes, Elm is a gateway drug to Haskell.
    • sanatgersappa 12y ago
      I expect that at some point, someone will write a Elm -> Haskell thing (like Elixir -> Erlang).
      • codygman 12y ago
        I'm pretty sure I read about someone writing this at some point, but I couldn't find it.
• bjz_ 12y ago
  I personally find all the changes really nice. (<|), (|>), (<<), (>>), are far more intuitive compared to the Haskell operators for example. Yes, it's just syntax, but usability is important. As an aside, Idris uses (:) in type signatures, and doesn't have a lift function in its standard library (it just leans on a genereralised map function).
  • tel 12y ago
    The only reason why Haskell uses (::) is because they wanted to preserve (:) for lists, thinking that list operations would be more prevalent than type operations. That ended up being a poor bet, as it turns out. (:) is very standard notation for "has type" in type theory. Also, all of the mapN functions exist in Haskell and Idris as applications of the Applicative typeclass.
• sbergot 12y ago
  Concerning [], many people regret that there is a special syntax for it in haskell