(I posted this same answer in the r/Haskell crosspost, I think it may be useful here as well.)
I'm the "David" the article talks about. The backstory is this:
I spent a year abroad, but we were regularly talking over XMPP. One day, Dobi gave me a link to an online book that has a sun saying "holy shit" on the front page. It was http://learnyouahaskell.com/, and it spoke of some obscure language I had never heard of. But I found the pictures funny so I started reading the first chapter.
A month later, Dobi had long lost interest in Haskell himself, but I was hooked. Every "wow FP is awesome moment" was forcibly shared with him. I soon began to talk about ApplicativeMonoidMonadFunctor and how neat these abstractions are.
Since that one day when I received the LYAH link, it's marked "Dobi shows David Haskell day" in my calendar, this has continued: I'm learning Haskell, and everything cool is thrown at Dobi. He even made a second attempt at learning Haskell, but due to its inaccessibility (relative to Elm), he lost interest again.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, he asks me whether I knew Elm. I said yes, but as someone who now uses Haskell as his main language, I thought of Elm as a toy. Today I see how this was wrong: Elm is an excellent language, maybe not to write a scalable webserver, but it gets a few things right that Haskell doesn't:
- Elm is very accessible.
- Even simple and small programs can have cool output, and by that I don't mean conceptually cool but you-can-show-your-friends cool. Getting positive feedback is really motivating in the beginning when you're not quite sure whether the language is useful yet.
- Elm has Haskell-like syntax, and is of similar semantic structure. It has recursive lists, fold, map, Maybe and all those other Haskell Prelude things.
- No category-like abstractions (as a result of not having typeclasses, mostly). Monads are pretty abstract, and are pretty infamous among people that don't know them. This significantly lowers the barrier of entry.
The crucial thing is the similarity to Haskell: Elm is a much better gateway drug to Haskell-like languages than say XMonad (which is pretty geeky) or other nice little things. Once you can write Elm, a Monad is just another addition to a language you already know how to move in, and you can learn to include it in your programming instead of requiring it in the first place. I think instead of having a "beginner-friendly monomorphic Prelude" we should have generalized the crap out of Prelude (Foldable, Traversable, all those things go in) and recommended Elm to newcomers if they have problems with Haskell.
I'm the "David" the article talks about. The backstory is this:
I spent a year abroad, but we were regularly talking over XMPP. One day, Dobi gave me a link to an online book that has a sun saying "holy shit" on the front page. It was http://learnyouahaskell.com/, and it spoke of some obscure language I had never heard of. But I found the pictures funny so I started reading the first chapter.
A month later, Dobi had long lost interest in Haskell himself, but I was hooked. Every "wow FP is awesome moment" was forcibly shared with him. I soon began to talk about ApplicativeMonoidMonadFunctor and how neat these abstractions are.
Since that one day when I received the LYAH link, it's marked "Dobi shows David Haskell day" in my calendar, this has continued: I'm learning Haskell, and everything cool is thrown at Dobi. He even made a second attempt at learning Haskell, but due to its inaccessibility (relative to Elm), he lost interest again.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, he asks me whether I knew Elm. I said yes, but as someone who now uses Haskell as his main language, I thought of Elm as a toy. Today I see how this was wrong: Elm is an excellent language, maybe not to write a scalable webserver, but it gets a few things right that Haskell doesn't:
- Elm is very accessible.
- Even simple and small programs can have cool output, and by that I don't mean conceptually cool but you-can-show-your-friends cool. Getting positive feedback is really motivating in the beginning when you're not quite sure whether the language is useful yet.
- Elm has Haskell-like syntax, and is of similar semantic structure. It has recursive lists, fold, map, Maybe and all those other Haskell Prelude things.
- No category-like abstractions (as a result of not having typeclasses, mostly). Monads are pretty abstract, and are pretty infamous among people that don't know them. This significantly lowers the barrier of entry.
The crucial thing is the similarity to Haskell: Elm is a much better gateway drug to Haskell-like languages than say XMonad (which is pretty geeky) or other nice little things. Once you can write Elm, a Monad is just another addition to a language you already know how to move in, and you can learn to include it in your programming instead of requiring it in the first place. I think instead of having a "beginner-friendly monomorphic Prelude" we should have generalized the crap out of Prelude (Foldable, Traversable, all those things go in) and recommended Elm to newcomers if they have problems with Haskell.