Prototype wrapup #18

Last week I made 1 prototype, and this week I made 1 again. I wrote recently that I feel like my prototypes were being abused to fulfill a desire to work on small projects. I attempted to fix this by working on a prototype that would help me keep my prototypes small. In a fairly predictable twist of massive irony, that prototype turned out to be too large and ended up as basicaly a small project. I think I need to be more careful about avoiding prototypes with producty goals.

Sunday

I started working on a little countdown timer project in Elm. I'm still hopeful Elm can be a really powerful way to write functional web applications, but so far it's mostly been a pain in the butt. This time I ran into a bunch of issues to do with updating changing quantities (like time or URL fragment) and getting their initial value. You seem to have to do these two parts separately which seems really inelegant, and it turns out getting the current time is basically a nightmare. I got enough working that I could count down to a time specified in the URL fragment, but that's mostly in spite of Elm, not because of it. I'm hopeful that with a bit more practice it will get easier, but I also have a gnawing suspicion that web-based functional programming may just be more trouble than it's worth.