Summary: "Developer Happiness on the Front End with Elm"

Interested in Elm coming from a dynamic language?

You could hardly ask for a better introduction than Kevin Yank gives in his video “Developer Happiness on the Front End with Elm”.

Here’s my synopsis:

🤔 Reasons for choosing Elm

Kevin gives the context in which his team at Culture Amp decided to use Elm with their Rails backend.

Elm aligns with Ruby’s value of developer happiness, and doesn’t suffer from the same issues with backwards compatibility as JS.

🏛 Overview of Elm’s design

Kevin gives a clear explanation of:

  • The structure of an Elm program
  • Elm’s friendly compiler errors and the educational material they include
  • How type annotations improve the error message from the compiler

✅ The benefits of static types

  • Why not just auto-convert Int to String?
  • How undefined errors can propagate into user interfaces
  • Sources of undefined values can be hard to find
  • How Elm has no null, and what it uses instead

🌳 Elm’s radical simplicity

Compared to “JavaScript fatigue”, Elm includes best-in-class tools for:

  • Packages
  • Build tools
  • Frameworks
  • Type checking
  • Immutable data

And compared to other languages, Elm:

  • Doesn’t use obscure FP jargon
  • Looks to remove features

Thanks Kevin Yank for a clear, well-structured and educational video on Elm! ❤️

📺 Watch it here:

This post was originally a Twitter thread as part of Ship 30 for 30.