• 0 Posts
  • 3 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle

  • Elm (for frontend). https://elm-lang.org/

    Nothing is as easy to refactor, maintain, add new features to, work with after a gap, nothing else is as crashless and rock solid.

    No compiler is a fast, friendly, helpful and insightful. Seriously. You don’t wait for the compiler. It’s instant even on huge code bases. And the resulting output outperforms other major frameworks.

    Its syntax is weird at first (even stranger than python) and the autoformatter is mad keen on blank lines but after a while it’s just so clear and easy to follow.

    You have to let go of your object oriented mindset and stop trying to turn everything into objects and components but everything I hated about maintaining old code evaporated once I did. I used to believe that objects detangled code, I don’t know why I continued to believe that despite the evidence, because apart from pretty small and simple things, OO code gets extremely tangled. Elm is absurdly easy to refractor, so you just do.

    It’s genuinely nice to add new features to old code, something I’ve never experienced before in a few decades of programming.

    The elm slack is also a very helpful place indeed and you usually get a lot of support pretty quickly.

    Adding the link to their front page, I see they call it “A delightful language for reliable web applications” and the first claim is “no runtime exceptions”. I remember thinking that was marketing BS but being intrigued by the bold claim. A few years later and I can honestly say that that accurately describes my experience.

    These last few years I’ve rediscovered the joy of coding.


  • Yeah but javascript has 473 popular frameworks and counting, and the churn is immense. Your codebase becomes out of date before you’ve finished writing it.

    And the debugging?! I’ll try to finish writing this paragraph despite the uncontrollable twitching. Let’s just say that javascript is the kind of language that looks at your car with a missing left front wheel and says “let’s go”, while your IDE whispers “Yes, but maybe just don’t turn right. Certainly don’t turn right fast, unless you want to of course.”