Currently reading Why Elm?

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Currently reading Why Elm?

Why indeed not Elm? It strikes me as a small Haskell like functional programming language. Ramin Honary first put me on to this language quite a while ago. It was however very early in my exploration of functional programming languages. I think that now I’m just about ready to think about writing something using it.

https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/why-elm/9781491990728/
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Published by John Hardy

Closures are a poor man's object. Objects are a poor man's closure.

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6 thoughts on “Currently reading Why Elm?”

  1. I’ll be sure to check this book out. My company gets me free access to Safari Books as well.

    I’ve been trying to think of a more fun, non-trivial project to work on in Elm, but I haven’t really come up with anything compelling yet. Maybe a game of some kind.

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  2. This book was really short 😁 so I guess I’m back to looking for something a bit better. I started looking into Haskell again but want something that doesn’t get so bogged down in big language features and with a greater emphasis on solving web issues.

    Currently reading Thinking Functionally with Haskell by Richard Bird.

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  3. John Hardy Turnbull delenda est

    Yes, although Haskell is a little bulky, I honestly do not know any better language.

    I know there has been some pretty good progress in compiling Haskell to JavaScript lately. There is the GHC-JS compiler, which I haven’t been able to get working because I don’t want to upgrade to GHC 8 quite yet. There is also the Haste compiler https://haste-lang.org/ developed at Chalmers University which I have yet to try, but looks promising, and will compile with GHC 7 or later.

    For the web, I have been meaning to give Elixer a try ( https://elixer-lang.org ). I have already read through Cesarini and Thompson’s book “Erlang by Example” as a learning project I did with a close friend of mine. Erlang really does such a fantastic job with the server side, and Elixer is a natural extension of the Erlang ecosystem to the web domain.

    What I didn’t like about Erlang or Elixer was the lack of static type checking and inference that Haskell has, which made it feel more like Python with a very awkward Prolog-esque syntax.

    Also, my friend whom I was studying Erlang with also did most of the exercises in the Erlang by Example book in both Erlang and in Haskell by using the Cloud Haskell framework, a project which has the explicit goal of mimicking the Erlang execution model. It also makes use of Haskell’s “generic data types” features to automatically generate the data marshaling code used to send information between processes.

    But I have so much on my plate already. So many technologies to play with, so little time.

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  4. Ramin Honary the bulkiness is a problem I think for wider adoption. That’s where the need for these smaller langs is coming from. At the moment though Im just trying to learn the principles and make decisions about languages later.

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  6. Name dropping: I studied CS in Uppsala with Francesco Cesarini and Erik Happi back in 1995, when we did a large student project in Erlang. Distributed calculation in Erlang and Prolog. 😉

    Later Happi went on optimize Erlang VM and then to work on Scala.

    Erlang was and is a great language and developed a bit since then. The big thing with Erlang is that is designed to manage program faults gracefully. So it even use that to load a new version of the software in a running system.

    On topic.

    You might want to have a look at OcaML. I have used it a bit, and it looks nice, as most ML based languages. It have some frameworks for Web pages. But that I have not tried yet.

    I am also interested in books about Erlang and ML/Haskell. So I really like reading discussions like this.

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