…where it’s something that a good number of people have heard of, but a much smaller number of people have actually tried, and an even smaller number of people are actually using it professionally. So we don’t really have even like a bellwether of how many people are– So as far as absolute growth numbers, we don’t really have a great way to measure that, in part because around the time of GDPR we were like “You know, we could do a bunch of stuff to make the website compliant with cookies and whatnot, or we could just stop tracking visits”, and we just decided to stop tracking visits. So there was always that kind of question, where it’s like “Hey, even if this is really great, even if it has all these benefits, is that gonna be something that teams are just unwilling to give a real shot to?” And it turns out the answer seems to be actually they are willing to give it a shot, and that’s really changing. Obviously, that’s a bigger barrier to a lot of teams trying to adopt it than it is to say we’re a library, or we’re a framework. In 2017 it was something like 18% of survey respondents said that they were using Elm at work, and 2018 it was like 40%, so more than double… Which was really fantastic, because one of the concerns with a project like Elm is it’s like, hey, this is a new programming language. First of all, I think the biggest change that we’ve seen in the past year – so we started doing The State of Elm Survey, and comparing 2017 to 2018, the biggest change that we saw was actually more people using Elm on teams, at work, rather than as individuals, as hobbyists. This is probably a good time to mention that we’re hiring, so if you wanna come work with me and Evan… ![]() For context, I think it’s 26 engineers now. I don’t know, I guess we’re aware that that’s not a common thing for a company our size. He basically has complete autonomy to take Elm in whatever direction he thinks is best, and we trust his judgment, because that’s what has led us to embrace it in the first place. We want you to keep doing what you’re doing, we just wanna be kind of more plugged into it.” Basically, what he said to Evan was “Hey, the reason we wanna hire you is that Elm has been really great for us and we don’t wanna mess with the formula. My boss - full credit to him, it was his idea to see if we could hire Evan. Evan basically is really just 100% open source engineer. ![]() The product is basically a web application for teachers to help teach those students English, and more specifically writing. We hired him in January 2016, and he’s never done anything directly for the product. It’s in Evan’s contract that he only works on Elm. As a consequence of that, I used to be able to say that we’d had zero runtime exceptions in the entire time we’d had Elm deployed. It has a really amazing, friendly, helpful compiler, with really nice error messages that tell you about problems before they happen to end users. Some of the stuff that’s cool about Elm - 1) it’s really, really reliable and easy to maintain. ![]() Basically, everybody who works on the front-end writes Elm full-time it’s been really great. Our first commit was in 2015, so it’s been somewhere between 3 and 4 years that we’ve been doing it in production. We make tools for English teachers, and basically, our entire front-end - or just about I guess we have some legacy React stuff from back in the day, but pretty much everything is in Elm. ![]() It’s sort of like the language provides enough that you don’t need a framework. People often consider it an alternative to JavaScript frameworks, because in addition to being a programming language, it also comes with enough tools out the box to build an entire web app… So we don’t really have frameworks in Elm. Elm is a programming language for building web apps.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |