Hacker News Reader

Comment by elbear | Hacker News Reader

Here's how I see his point.

He came to Elm expecting a Haskell for the web. Elm has the completely opposite philosophy of keeping things simple, even if it means extra boilerplate.

I can understand OP's frustration, but if he watched a few of Evan's talks (like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSjbTC-hvqQ), he would realise his expectations about Elm are wrong. Also, he forgot that Elm (just like any other open source project) doesn't owe him anything. That's why many people take an issue with his tone.

In summary, Elm's target audience are JavaScript developers. It's developers who want their apps to be more robust and easier to refactor than in plain JavaScript. Sure, type classes are useful but they also increase complexity. Evan wants to see if there's a better solution and the Elm community generally accepts that.

View on HN

> Also, he forgot that Elm (just like any other open source project) doesn't owe him anything. That's why many people take an issue with his tone.

We can't take issue with his tone by appropriating information about Elm's direction in an ex post facto manner. The guy - whatever guy - is a newcomer to Elm, picks it up, see an obvious deficiency, asks (quite politely, I might add) about a feature addition, gets a dismissive answer. That's the context. We can't apply Evan's* rationale behind the reply here, because the OP never had the chance to have it revealed to him to the extent of his interaction.

I'm surprised I have to point this stuff out. However understanding we may be, surely we can see why anybody is frustrated with being dismissed like this?

* Apologies, but I don't actually know Elm's author's last name.

Is Elm open source? If so, couldn't the author implement the feature themselves? If the maintainer doesn't want it, then idk, fuck off? Nobody said he had to use it. When did open source turn into "Do whatever random people tell you to do, for free"? Talk about entitlement....

> Is Elm open source? If so, couldn't the author implement the feature themselves?

Yeah!

Just create and maintain your own damn dialect of a language!

It's OPEN SOURCE, that means you automatically know and are an expert in anything it involves!

It's 2016, we can stop with that meme now.

As I said in my post, I understand OP's frustration. I understand that he expected more consideration for his efforts to learn the language and his suggestions for improvement.

The deficiency was only in his eyes though. Evan and the Elm community are fully aware of the type classes thing, because it's been mentioned by many people. He just doesn't see it as something that requires an immediate solution.

To summarize: I understand OP's frustration. At the same time, Elm (just like any other open source project) doesn't owe him anything. If you open a pull request or an issue you are not guaranteed a resolution in your favor. Ranting will help you vent but that's it.

> He came to Elm expecting a Haskell for the web

No, I don't think that's true. He came to Elm hoping there would be some useful ways to create abstractions in the language (that doesn't necessarily mean there has to be typeclasses. in fact, the whole article his him pursuing an alternate method of abstraction), and besides creating a function there really is none in Elm.

You must resign yourself to write the same boilerplate over and over. It is impossible to keep any large Elm project DRY.

and who cares? fork the project and add the feature yourself. when I buy banana yogurts at the supermarket, I don't write to the yogurt company asking to change the flavour if I don't like it. I just buy a different brand of yogurt. Elm is even free as in free beer and free speech!

There is a limited interaction between yogurt buyers and yogurt makers that solely consists of buying or not buying stuff. There is more interaction between programming language creators and programmers and indeed between programmers about their tools.

Analysis in depth is a useful thing for not only the creator who is likely to already understand the trade offs he has made but for other current and potential users of the language.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com