elm-format VS bytestring

Keep in mind for the pipes, many in Elm, whether they’re using elm-format or not, will break the pipes to a different line in case there are many of them. For some, they find this more readable (I’m in that group). Let’s show an example of that using the same pattern to design a Paginator, the row of numbered buttons that allow you to move between pages of data.

9ᵗʰ - Aaron VonderHaar releases a new version of elm-format.

Unlike Javascript, Elm has an official Style Guide for how Elm code should be structured. In addition, some formatting is built into the language itself, such as requiring indents of four spaces. This removes a major point of contention within teams. In addition, the community has put together a wonderful tool called elm-format. Similar to Prettier, this utility can be used to ensure that all Elm code matches the official style guide. Unlike Prettier, there is no custom configuration, meaning once again that your team can focus on writing code instead of what kind of quotes to use.

Regarding user experience and tooling, I'd suggest you use an editor that is compatible with the elm language server: https://github.com/elm-tooling/elm-language-server VSCode is a good default choice. You'll also be interested in other toolings. elm-json (https://github.com/zwilias/elm-json) is great to simply install and uninstall dependencies. elm-format (https://github.com/avh4/elm-format) is a must since most active people in the community use it, and simply viewing your code being moved around on save is a good sign that you wrote something with a good syntax.

Take for example the debate about 2 vs 4 spaces. People often (but not always) have very strong opinions about this, yet it is clear that this formatting choice will probably not be the dominant factor in the success of a project. A quick google search also reveals no scientific research in this field. Concerning surveys, I found this interesting (from a survey on 2 vs 4 spaces in elm-format) as one datapoint:

The documentation is itself fairly funny, for those who don’t care to click ahead:

> This "function" has a superficial similarity to ‘unsafePerformIO’ but it is in fact a malevolent agent of chaos. It unpicks the seams of reality (and the IO monad) so that the normal rules no longer apply. It lulls you into thinking it is reasonable, but when you are not looking it stabs you in the back and aliases all of your mutable buffers. The carcass of many a seasoned Haskell programmer lie strewn at its feet.

> Witness the trail of destruction:

    https://github.com/haskell/bytestring/commit/71c4b438c675aa360c79d79acc9a491e7bbc26e7

If you bring in efficient strings from bytestring, densely packed arrays from vector, and an in-place sort from vector-algorithms, you can bring it down to 275ms (uses 19MB of mem).

bytestring

Note that this release is broken for Windows.

I've opened https://github.com/haskell/bytestring/issues/455 so the situation can be improved. You're very welcome to chime in on the discussion or to contribute some of the missing documentation yourself! :)

Highlights from the changelog:

Well, ByteString in particular should not have an IsString instance in a new report. That's pretty clear by https://github.com/haskell/bytestring/issues/140 : the concensus is that there is no good solution right now, but it should not have gotten an IsString instance in the first place. If a theoretical new Haskell Report 202x includes OverloadedStrings (as it should) to handle string literals analogously to numeric literals, I'd expect it to not give ByteString (which is really just a collection of octets) an IsString instance, with all it's issues and rattail due to the encoding question being implicitized.

Standard streaming libraries. They are being written by people that make the effort to understand performance and I have a hope that they make sure their streams run in linear space under any optimizations. It is curious and unsettling that we have standard lazy text and byte streams at the same time — and the default lazy lists, of course. I have been doing some work on byte streams and what I found out is that there is no way to check that your folds are actually space constant even if the value in question is a primitive, like say a byte — thunks may explode and then collapse over the run time of a single computation, defying any effort at inspection.