Getting Started with Elm | Hacker News Reader

Getting Started with Elm

pragmaticstudio.com

86 pointscorysama14 comments

Whoa, Elm is a language? And here all along I thought it was an MUA: http://www.instinct.org/elm/

Every time I read an article on HN about Elm, I go through a moment of confusion. Elm wasn't just some random piece of rarely-used free software where it makes sense to re-use the name. It was an extremely popular mail program. If you're reading HN, you are the kind of person who 20 years ago would have used or at least tried Elm.

It's a bad idea to re-use a name for a product when the prior product targeted essentially the same users.

A very large percentage of the HN population has been using computers for less than 15 years. The creator of Elm is a very smart cookie. But, there's a good chance he has never heard of the Elm mail client. I've got bad news for ya: We're old.

As long as the successor language isn't called pine. Frankly, its not a big deal.

Good chance that the creator of Elm, has heard of google thou

> I've got bad news for ya: We're old.

Yes, I do notice that every time I discuss about the days when C was UNIX only, we had a huge variety of OS and hardware architectures to chose from or simple things like language design.

All themes that seem century old for the majority of HN crowd.

But elm isn't particularly old - as recently as 1999, when I started doing IT at Loudcloud, there were a bunch of users who still wanted to use elm as their primary email client.

It's like naming something "eudora"

1999 was 16 years ago. The last release of Elm (the mail client) was 10 years ago. I started using the Internet back when AOL was still charging an hourly (rather than monthly) fee, and if I've ever heard of Elm (the mail client), it wasn't enough to be able to remember it today.

So yes, Elm (the mail client) is particularly old.

Thanks for the detailed writeup! I've done a lot with the Reactjs-esque elm-html, but have yet to try out the graphics libraries.

This was a nice introduction to that part of the ecosystem, and I definitely plan to revisit this post when I get around to taking Elm's graphical capabilities for a spin.

I heard sometime ago that given that Elm is build around FRP, is not very good for making widgets or reusable and nested components. Why would this be the case?

Where have you heard that?

Having used Elm a little, the aim certainly is completely opposite to that. Moreover, Elm is mostly pure even in its handling of the reactive paradigm. That alone should make it more composable than most other languages. Should, because as far as I know it hasn't been proven just yet.

I scanned the headlines on Hacker News and thought this said "Getting Started with Elf" :P

In it, voted 5

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