Understanding Elm

I played with Elm a little as well. Right now is not the time to start learning it by the way, because there will be a new website with new tutorials up soon. The last release (0.15) introduced some major changes, so it's better to just wait for them to update the docs and tutorials.

This has been my experience as well. Learning basic Haskell (from cis194[0]) helped with Elm, however it took a while (about 3 days) before I began being productive at all. Too productive, in fact. Once the basic application is in place, implementing additional features have been laughably easy. For example, implementing the search feature[1][2] took surprisingly little effort.

[0]: https://github.com/bitemyapp/learnhaskell#yorgeys-cis194-cou... [1]: https://github.com/srid/chronicle/commit/4a6c18147bf1596b234... [2]: https://github.com/srid/chronicle/commit/fb040b9e3268d7d843e...

The other benefit is static typing with option types leading to nearly no runtime error! For example, when I did a substantial refactoring[a] of my code, aside from fixing type errors there were no runtimes errors when the new app was run. This is basically unthinkable when writing in plain JavaScript.

[a]: https://github.com/srid/chronicle/commit/f81d6d9c04e75fbd9e7...

Finally, large Elm programs benefit from componentization[x] of the model and related structures (actions, view, request, run). This is something I plan to blog about later on.

[x]: https://github.com/rtfeldman/dreamwriter/issues/39

Elm the mail reader is quite old and obsolete. It makes sense to garbage collect our namespaces every once in a while so names can be used anew.

I have some nostalgia for PINE, being a UW alum. Perhaps I will call my next reactive programming language Pine (well...maybe not).

Not useless, it was the first thing that I thought of as well. It took about 2-3 months of Go postings before I realized that HN was singularly uninterested in 2500+ year old incredibly complex Chinese board games.