Haskell for Elm developers: giving names to stuff (part 1) 🚀

I am happy to discuss whatever proposal, feedback or general concern you might have about this topic here after reading the blogpost: Haskell for Elm developers: giving names to stuff (Part 1 - Functors) - DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻

Hope you enjoy it! :raised_hands:t2:

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Post is great. I liked the message and enjoyed your writing.

I want to talk about some small thing, that’s bothering me whenever someone writes about Elm. This community tends to use this passive-aggressive quips against other solutions. I think we should be careful with that. They are like inside jokes with friends - made in public could alienate people that we want to reach to.

In your post you have this fragment:

Well, I think one of the design decisions for Elm was to be simple from the beginning and not bother people with buzzwords

“Functor” is not a buzzword. It was very precise term that was understood by community. It provided well defined meaning and simplified communication. Maybe if Haskell didn’t care about backwards compatibility, they could change it. And for sure I think other languages could use different terms if they aim for different audiences. But it is not a buzzword. It doesn’t stand in the same row with “blazing fast” or “fearless refactoring”.

And to be honest, we’re always talking about “buzzwords” as something negative, hence my rant.

But again, post was great and it triggered me to write about something that worried me for a long time.

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good point - same with Monad - but I think here it’s clear that this was not meant negatively … after all there are these ubiquitous Burrito-memes I think ever functional programmer will soon find :wink:

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I’m in the target audience for this post and I enjoyed it. I have plenty of Elm experience but no Haskell experience and I’m somewhat intimidated by it. “Functor” is a term I’d had explained to me before but it didn’t sink in those times nearly as well as when you explained it this time. Maybe it’s just the way you talked about it purely in terms of Elm which I know very well and when you pointed out that List, Dict, Maybe, etc. are all functors. If you choose to do a follow-up post maybe explain Monads in the same way? :slight_smile:

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Thanks very much for your message :heart: It is just what I needed to hear because it is exactly what I intended: to make it easier to understand for an Elm audience. It felt so liberating to assume Elm experience for this blogpost and just focus in the gap between Elm & Haskell. Thanks again for your kind words and for sure if I continue the series will try to explain Monads as easy as possible! :wink:

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