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Comment by erokar | Hacker News Reader

What has been removed is just syntactic sugar that can easily be acheived in other ways. I think it's a good thing that Elm's core is kept as clean and simple as possible. There are enough other languages with a kitchen sink philosophy.

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Explain the 'other ways' I can name a function with a prime or use backticks now that the compiler won't allow it.

The migration guide [1] suggests that instead of primes you can use underscores. And instead of backticks you can use pipelining.

[1]: https://github.com/elm-lang/elm-platform/blob/11c8ecb81a58b8...

My mistake, I thought you were saying I could still have the syntax features I wanted in the language. I like the range syntax, and backticks, and calling functions'. I also liked signals and having access to more stuff that is now 'magic' in the Elm compiler.

It sounds like you might like PureScript [1] or GHCJS [2] more than Elm. Have you tried either of those?

[1]: http://www.purescript.org/ [2]: https://github.com/ghcjs/ghcjs

No, those don't really appeal to me. I think Elm had a great middle ground for a while pre-0.16 with Signals. I'm just disappointed at what I see as a lack of positive change for the language. The more stuff that becomes compiler magic the worse the language is going to get IMO.

> The more stuff that becomes compiler magic the worse the language is going to get IMO.

Not sure what you mean here. Elm 0.18 has less compiler magic, not more.

One such magic is the "comparable" thing. See http://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/elm-is-wrong and https://github.com/elm-lang/elm-compiler/issues/774

Yes, but that's not new in 0.18

Did you read my comment? I mentioned the removal of Signals and it's replacement with the 'magic' Html.app

Html.App used to be a namespace, I suspect you mean Program? In any case, how is that any more, or less, magic than Signals? Considering that the compiler has removed syntax in later versions, later versions of Elm has less magic than earlier versions.

Personally I do not like underscores. It can get real ugly.

So instead of:

    map3 f ( x, cmd ) ( y, cmd' ) ( z, cmd'' ) =

I will have to write:

    map3 f ( x, cmd ) ( y, cmd_ ) ( z, cmd__ ) =

https://github.com/Fresheyeball/elm-return/pull/4/files#diff...

And it affects package API too: https://github.com/elm-lang/svg/commit/40b761d66b48fcc28f5b5...

However that's just a matter of taste and does not deter me from continuing to use Elm.

Use numbers instead of backticks or underscores. There's a reason we got rid of roman numerals.

The "other way" is to use x_1, x_2, or to just use better variable names.

Haskellers are bad at coming up with informative variable names (and I say this as a Haskeller).

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