Hi everyone! Often it is helpful for me to hear the experience from someone who is just learning how to use my software. I think the same is probably true of programming languages so I thought I would share my story of learning Elm with you.
The Good Parts I started looking at Elm about a week and a half ago and have probably spent 20 hours reading and watching Elm content and writing Elm code. I found out about Elm because I have been interested in Elixir and stumbled into this conference talk by Rob Martin, *Teaching functional programming to noobs* (Lambda Days 2016) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmFKEewRRQg>. I jumped straight into writing code using Exercism.io exercises. I copied code I saw in examples but couldn't get too far. I watched Richard Feldman's *Introduction to Elm* <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBHB9i8e3Kc> and Evan's Let's be Mainstream <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYk8CKH7OhE>. Those two talks and occasionally looking up core library docs got me far enough that I could get through a good number of the Exercism exercises. I was impressed that the language was so intuitive, that error messages were sooo good, that currying was easy, and that using types was both terse and descriptive at the same time. I started working on updating a small personal project and realized I needed to understand 'The Elm Architecture' so I've been working through the tutorial with my remaining time in Elm. So far, the tutorial is great and progresses at a good speed. The Rough Edges I had a difficult time figuring out where to go for good documentation. Everything was spread out among multiple resources. My first experience was looking at elm-lang.org/docs where I found a dozen or so links that point to 5 different domains/subdomains. If I had come to Elm without hearing strong praise from a respected programmer then I'm not sure I would kept going. The disorder of the documentation gives the sense that Elm is a hobby language rather than production-ready. Elixir handles these concerns very well: Commonly used libraries have a consolidated guide <http://elixir-lang.org/getting-started/introduction.html> and documentation <http://elixir-lang.org/docs.html> within a single click of the language's homepage. Questions I have at this point (that would help me to know if Elm is worth continuing to invest in): How does 'The Elm Architecture' work with larger applications? I've seen some examples like the Todo app and the Flatris clone that have a high-ish number of actions that the app responds to in `update`. What about an app that spans multiple pages and should respond to hundreds of actions? Would you split the app into many small apps? If so, would there be a parent app that delegates actions? Also, can I use `The Elm Architecture` and Commands/Subscriptions outside of the HTML world? I think it would be helpful to answer these questions at some point in the documentation. Hopefully this ends up being useful. Overall, I have really enjoyed using the language and will continue to write Elm code in my free time and look for ways to use it professionally. Thanks for listening! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Elm Discuss" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
