Hacker News Reader

Comment by ltbarcly3 | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why this is noteworthy.

I think maybe this is when you decide 'maybe our language has failed'. Or at least admit it's a toy language that hasn't been properly engineered to be effectively used commercially. When it's a 'worth mentioning' when a single app has been written in it by some dying company.

I mean, imagine if we had a headline on the frontpage of HN for every app written in C or C++ or Java or Python (or Objective-C or Swift or C# or even Visual Basic or Rust)

Steve Yegge said it best almost 10 years ago: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2010/12/haskell-researchers...

Functional languages are great toys but nobody uses them to get work done, almost without exception.

View on HN

> Functional languages are great toys but nobody uses them to get work done, almost without exception.

I run my own businesses on functional programming languages (Haskell and Elm) almost exclusively.

100% of my income comes from the three software products I own, all primarily written in Haskell.

You're displaying a pretty amazing level of ignorance here.

That sounds really interesting! What's the market/domain of your software product?

I'd say the products themselves are fairly uninteresting :)

NewBusinessMonitor[0] is a tool for marketing your products/services to businesses in the UK. This company is a bootstrapped SaaS, built and run by just me. It's been taking money for over a year.

Comparestack[1] is a price comparison platform. Our first product is Moneygains[2] — a way for residents of Northern Ireland to switch to a better deal on their home electricity. I'm building this with a partner — he's taking care of all the business stuff.

I have a third in the reinsurance space, and it has taken funding. I'm not going to talk about this one so much for the time being — it's still in stealth mode.

[0]: https://newbusinessmonitor.co.uk/

[1]: https://comparestack.com/

[2]: https://moneygains.co.uk/

This is a good example of survivor bias.

You have to take into account that Elm is relying on organic growth. If React had been released by a bunch of enthusiasts with day jobs, and no Facebook behind it, it may be in the same position as Elm.

> Steve Yegge said it best almost 10 years ago

That reads like a Register article. It's just a bit of fun.

> Functional languages are great toys but nobody uses them to get work done, almost without exception.

Just because you don’t use functional languages for serious commercial work and don’t personally know anybody who does, doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t too. Plenty of us use functional languages for serious commercial work, now or in the past. I’ve persobally used ClonureScript and know plenty of people who use Clojure. I know people who use Haskell. Jane Street famously use OCaml. Lots of people use Scala. Clearly an IBM team uses Elm. I mean, the article itself is a counter example to your statement.

Both can be correct - some number of folks do use them, but they are vanishingly small in the sea of developers out there.

I think this is interesting to me because Elm is an extremely unique way of doing frontend development on the web by utilizing functional programming concepts.

IBM, in my mind, is a massive dinosaur. To know that some group there was able to make a consumer facing product using the latest tech is cool. Definitely gives IBM a better favorability rating in my view.

Not to be glib, but what you are saying, kind-of, is "the worse a company is at staying up to date with technology, the more meaningful it is if they use a fringe langauge"

I don't see that as a criticism. It just means a new technology is noteworthy enough that even those slow to catch up get interested. Like when senior citizens started using iPads.

Yes? If a company sucks at trying new things, then it's probably noteworthy when they bothered to try a new thing, because it implies that either 1. they're pulling out of their rut, or 2. this thing was so great that even they wanted to use it.

(Note, I'm not convinced that IBM is quite so ... obsolete... as this discussion implies, either.)

Considering they sold most of their hardware department, such as harddrive to Hitachi and thinkpad to Lenovo, and went focusing on patents, this is a change in their image. I had the view they were risk adverse, to be using Elm is interesting.

It's noteworthy that as you have shown, functional languages still have this insane opposition in the industry because they are perceived as toy languages.

Despite the fact that they have a very bullish minority in the industry doing some very serious and lucrative work using them.

See for example Jane Street and Ocaml.

The fact that functional languages are not yet "mainstream" is more of an artefact to two things unrelated to their capability as languages in an industrial setting:

a) Historical baggage. Industry has always taken the first tool it has come up with, declared it the "professional tool", which has become a self fullfilling prophecy then. Despite when looked from historical perspective, there is no technical reason why the chosen language was best among many. See for example C, C++, Java, and my favorite example JavaScript (ship it! 9 days is quite enough to make a language).

I.e. industry has taken anything that creates an abstract syntax three that can be transferred to the chosen execution context, and maked it work by adding tooling and education, no matter how crude the language itself was.

b) Lack of industrial quality tooling. See a). Industrial quality tooling is often a sane prequirement to choose a language for a project. There might be instances where you feel you might want to hire a legion of developers, and then you choose probably one of the most popular languages because it has tooling and it has a large number of candidates who know the language.

Note: neither the fact that the language has tooling, nor that is popular, does mean it's the "best" for an arbitrary scenario.

Totally:

https://reasonml.github.io/blog/2017/09/08/messenger-50-reas...

"Which Team's Next?

We believe in iterating on/alongside product teams in order to create the best infra. The product teams' and open source folks' feedback has changed our strategy a few times, for the better. As of today, Reason and BuckleScript are also deployed on a WhatsApp internal tool, Instagram Web (small scale), plus some critical Ads internal tools. We'll be working closely with these teams over the next year."

> I mean, imagine if we had a headline on the frontpage of HN for every app written in C or C++ or Java or Python (or Objective-C or Swift or C# or even Visual Basic or Rust)

IBM writing an app of this size in Rust would definitely be headline-worthy.

For other languages you list, it's not, but only because they're already well-established, and have been for decades. But it could have been a headline when they were new and unproven.

I think it is newsworthy because it details the strengths and weaknesses of Elm in what looks like a fairly complex project. I already use and like Elm better than any other front-end framework, but if I was considering Elm as a possibility, this information would be quite useful, I think.

Definitely not the most important thing on the list, but I use Vim to code so IDE integrations mean absolutely nothing to me. I hate IDEs. To companies and teams that can't go to the bathroom without an IDE, that may be a deal breaker. Either way, it is good information to have.

Just so you know, Vim has Elm plugins: https://github.com/ElmCast/elm-vim.

As an aside, of all the things I judge a job offer on, whether or not they use IDEs is pretty far down the list.

I can get Visual Studio to behave like VIM and vice versa probably.

I find it interesting that people sometimes hold this in high regard.

One of the reason I like Elm is that it has great potential for great IDEs. If you use Vim with lot of plugins then it is already sort of a minimal IDE right? Most IDE you hate perhaps have a lot of UX design problems. Good IDEs should aim for a better overall coding experience, by this definition.

For example in Elm, all the nice error messages can appear next to the line, and all the case-of statements can be auto-completed according to the type definition, it all adds to an overall better coding experience.

>I mean, imagine if we had a headline on the frontpage of HN for every app written in C or C++ or Java or Python (or Objective-C or Swift or C# or even Visual Basic or Rust)

Doesn't this already happen almost every day for Rust and Go?

> Functional languages are great toys but nobody uses them to get work done, almost without exception.

Whatsapp was written in a FP, as is a large segment of Cisco router control plane. React arguably is strongly pushing towards a FP subset of ECMA6.

>Functional languages are great toys but nobody uses them to get work done, almost without exception.

As somebody who's been working with Clojure professionally for nearly a decade that's big news to me. Also, you might be surprised to know that it's used by companies like Walmart for critical infrastructure https://clojure.org/community/success_stories

Could you be more condescending.

I wouldn't take comments about the relative popularity of programming language threads so personally as to insult someone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com