kasbah

I recently decided on gitter.im plus a channel on IRC and a bot [1] that syncs them.

[1]: https://github.com/finnp/gitter-irc-bot

100% agree and it makes me try and handle state in a similar way even in plain Javascript without any libraries.

Will check out take-home more when I get a chance, I did see some murmurs on the Elm mailing list of how it would be easy to do server side rendering. What impressed me about React's was that I could just call a function and get the HTML as a string. My project is statically generated so that was exactly what I needed.

Yes, it was 0.14 at the time I believe, though that version number doesn't really mean that much. Would you have been more comfortable with 1.0.0? That's what the core library was at. Anyway, I should have realised there were some essential components missing and the JS interop would be a major road-block for this application.

To clarify further: I normally work as a firmware/electronics engineer so this was a bit of an experiment all around. I didn't charge my normal rates either.

Yes, the source-map support in browsers really needs to improve. NodeJS is another matter though as, in my experience, it maps seamlessly.

I think Coffeescript, TypeScript and Babel (ES6 and JSX) are completely different beasts to Elm though. I can look at the compiled output of these languages and debug that, I don't really need source maps (though they would be nice).

I guess the idea for Elm is, you won't need to debug as you won't get runtime errors.

I think that's a bit unfair as Elm is already seeing some professional use.

Though on the subject of inter-op, Purescript might be what you are looking for if you want a strongly-typed, Haskell-like language, compiled to JS with a less cumbersome foreign function interface.

Your point still stands though, I hope Elm comes up with some good ways to say "trust me I know what I am doing" and "here is some JS, run it".

EDIT: Though it might be that that goes against the whole premise of the language.

I really like Elm and have become an intermediate user of it (as well as Haskell). I felt like I really understood what Elm signals are about and made some optimisations to Helm [0] based on that.

I pushed to use it for a contract for an open source application [1]. Ultimately that wasn't a success due to various factors but it's interesting to note that the client dropped Elm after I left and hired people to re-write everything in JS.

In retrospect Elm really wasn't the right choice for that project because it wasn't mature enough (and maybe I hadn't been using it for long enough either). The lack of any kind continuation monad for managing effects at that point (later added to the language as Tasks) and the cumbersome interop with JS (still an issue) were real sticking points. It's just frustrating when you have a problem that can be solved trivially with a state-mutating for loop and you have no easy mechanism to do it. The boilerplate required to use Chrome's messaging within the app was really painful.

I tried to use Elm again for a personal project, a kind of gallery website with a JS search function [2]. After starting an initial prototype in Elm I switched to using React (which I had never used before) and found I was much more productive (even though the code is messier). Having a much bigger repository of re-usable modules and being able to take short cuts is really valuable at this stage of development (and the server-side compilation ability is really cool).

These experiences have made me wonder about the real-world place for Elm and how long it would take for it to rival something like React. I definitely think there is a lot of value in learning Elm to help you think about state in your application in a more higher level way but I would really hesitate in advocating to use it for real-world project at this stage (it does depend on the project of course).

[0] https://github.com/switchface/helm

[1] https://github.com/kasbah/mooltipass.hid-app

[2] http://kitnic.it/ | https://github.com/monostable/kitnic (work in progress)

Reminds me of when Linus tagged Linux 3.0 and it broke a bunch of peoples code due to their bad version checks. Linux 2.x had been going for about 15 years.

Check out his collaboration called Sangam, with Charles Lloyd and Eric Harland, if you are into Jazz. There is an excellent video recording on Youtube as well as a CD (which is quite different and worth checking out separately).

https://youtu.be/0-OSqHAeLBU?t=1m41s

I would view this as files with underscore being special and that is the convention. Being ignored is just the default special behaviour. Maybe in a future version there would be another file that does something more than being ignored.

I normally use Minunit which is 3 lines of source code.

http://www.jera.com/techinfo/jtns/jtn002.html

Which app did you switch to?

Looks like it will be 6$/mo: https://blog.sandstorm.io/news/2015-08-31-oasis-beta-launch....

Why did Google buy YouTube when they have Google Video?

Yes, I feel like both Gulp and Grunt miss something fundamental that Make still has. I don't want to depend on other people's plugins for basic tasks and I want to only rebuild the stuff that changed. I tried Gulp with some 'notice if changed' plugins but it didn't seem to work so I end up sticking to Make.

Some of my Make build systems have gotten a bit unwieldy so recently I have been looking at using Ninja and ninja-build-gen from npm. This way I can still write my configure and my build tasks in JS/CoffeeScript and get to use a modern less cluttered version of Make that will scale well with the project.

Would it be ok to apply solo but also as a co-founder on another team?

Where would be best to put this in the application form? I have explained that I am looking for co-founders and what I look for in them in the "Is there anything else we should know about your company?" section and am at the word limit. Can't seem to find a question that prompts me to to talk about how I will make do for the time being.

My podcast subscriptions:

General interest, science, philosophy, design and architecture:

* Radiolab: http://radiolab.org

* 99 Percent Invisible: http://99percentinvisible.org

Embedded systems/electronics:

* Sparkgap, focused on a specific technical topic each episode, sometimes with guests. http://thesparkgap.net

* Embedded.fm, focusued on technical and non-technical topics surrounding embedded systems software development but also often links with art and education, often with guests. http://embedded.fm

* AmpHour: Dave Jones and Chris Gammel ranting about whatever they feel like fairly often with guests. http://theamphour.com

Would you not want to spend your money on social mobility, equality and education?

Yes, ages ago.

Here is a great little video series that goes through implementing Redo in Haskell:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZ_nI9E9g0I

The thing is, despite RMS touting it of course, most of the GPL is completely irrelevant to hardware designs. Please consider choosing a simpler license. For most design files a CC-BY-SA license will have the same effect and the intention will be much clearer. If you want to make explicit patent grants the Apache is actually a good fit. There is even a modified one aimed at digital fabrication which let's you specify that a certain mark has to be included if copied and fabricated [1].

GPL is good for software, HDL and circuit masks only. I have seen a lot of debate around what one is allowed to do with GPLed PCB footprints. Bit of a pain in the ass really.

[1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20130718051941/http://jipel.law.n...

I tend to use that style because it matches git's generated commits ("Merge ...") and it saves a few characters. I found that when using a different tense ("Adding" or "Added") I would run out of characters more often.

I tried NixOS and had a very different experience. It is still a very new project and I encountered some very strange behavior which might be bugs or the result of me not understanding fully what is going on. I think I understand the premise quite well, having learned Haskell to an intermediate level, but in the end things didn't really work as expected.

It would have required a significant time effort from me to understand what is going on and get everything set up the way I want. I was just not willing to put that in at the time. I've gone back to Ubuntu for now.

I am doing more and more Haskell development so I'll take another run at it or, at least, set up nixpkgs on Ubuntu but I will probably give the project some time to mature.

I have witnessed very heavy handed policing of peaceful protestors and squatters here in the UK.

At the same time I know of cases of people being imprisoned that should be receiving psychiatric care instead; so point 6 in the article struck me especially.

The most Haskell-like and popular are:

- http://www.purescript.org/

- https://github.com/faylang/fay

- https://github.com/ghcjs/ghcjs

- http://elm-lang.org/

Each has it's own focus and strengths and weaknesses.

There is a long page on the Haskell wiki on the subject: https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/The_JavaScript_Problem

Michael Snoyman gave a really good talk recently which covers GHCJS and Fay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfINRj5OzGw

I find the wording in this article really odd. He was not an math enigma he was a mathematician; he solved enigmas.

>A vexing character himself, Mr. Grothendieck (pronounced GROAT-en-deek) turned away from mathematics at the height of his powers in the early 1970s

Math powers?

Sure, it wasn't meant as a dig at HN moderation, just a helpful suggestion.

I guess people could try doing it in /r/startups where (I think) the mods are more laissez-faire.

Totally interested!

There are no @ tags on HN.