Evan Czaplicki - Let's be mainstream! User focused design in Elm - Curry On

What people said

thinkpad20 · 2016-01 · Strong recommendation

> Elm is cute and interesting, but it's type system is less expressive than other languages and lacks features that I consider essential. I'd recommend watching this talk: [0]. Evan talks a lot about the decisions that went into the language, such as not having type classes or other advanced features. He makes a strong case for Elm not as a language-to-rule-them-all, but as a tool for the average programmer, who is more interested in building things than in learning about theory. The myriad language features in Haskell, OCaml, etc. are wonderful to those who understand them, but have not proven to be particularly effective at attracting those who aren't already interested in the languages. In that talk, he really made a strong case as to why Elm is valuable and relevant, even for someone such as myself, a functional programming nerd who loves learning about type theory, abstract algebra, and similar things. Also, I really don't think it's fair to say "The amount of people using Elm right now is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of people using OCaml (and F#, in more recent years)." OCaml has been around for almost 20 years now, and F# for more than 10. Both have the backing of very large development teams. [0]: [VIDEO]

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redbar0n · 2022-01 · Recommendation

Elm creator Evan Czaplicki can, in an elegant and pedagogical way that would feel familiar to at least developers coming from JS: [VIDEO] from 24:14 until 29:39. Haskell/FP/Math purists would probably balk at the oversimplification. But introducing intimidating concepts by way of such oversimplification (without entirely missing the target) is precisely the point! Beginners just need a very rough and coarse grained overview, so they are able to gain some basic familiarity with the concept. That gives them some already-familiar conceptual knobs to hang further details on, reduces fear, and inspires curiosity to investigate further.

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tcard · 2017-08 · Recommendation

A great take on this topic is a talk by Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, another functional language: Let's be mainstream! [1] The conclusions are more or less the same than the article, but Evan goes into a lot more depth. And in my opinion, as a result, Elm does very good in this regard. [1] [VIDEO]

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