Javascript to Elm

The idea of functional programing is more than just the use of functions, or functions as first class citizens. It is a real paradigm shift in the way we think about tackling problems with code. A lot of what brings me, and others, to Elm is the desire to learn and even more importantly use techniques that FP puts forth in our daily programing.

It’s time to dive right in with several uses of Ports in Elm, what better way than by example! Ports are Elms way of interacting with the outside world, currently with JavaScript, but the sky is the limit.

Working on Elm, but we still want to leverage our favorite library or something else from the vast ecosystem that is JavaScript or other languages. Is there a way to communicate across the boundries from Elm into JavaScript, and back, safely. There sure is, Ports! It is like JavaScript-as-a-Service.

We Turn our attention back to Haskell to help us get the best possible foundation for really diggin’ into functional programing. For me, only after doing piles of short examples, does it sink in for me, it’s the repetition and console output that is key.

Elm Conf was a little more than a month ago. I didn’t get a chance to go, as I had already spent my conference capital, but Elm Europe is in July, and who knows? I wanted to discuss a few of the talks I found interesting, and share my thoughts.

Maybe is a container, union type, type constructor. So, um, what does that mean? In Elm, null and undefined are not valid types, so what do we do when we might not have something? Let’s figure it out, and when it’s useful.

Taking a look at webassembly. A new compilation that brings more than just JavaScript to the web,allowing memory managed apps like, C/C++ and Rust to be compiled down to assembly and run in the browser environment. This along side your current JavaScript code.

Coming from JavaScript, as a tool I use everyday, one that powers so much of the web and beyond, I wanted to look at a comparison of what we get out of using static types in a language like Elm versus JavaScript. This was spured by a paper To Type or Not to Type: Quantifying Detectable Bugs in JavaScript Software Engineering (ICSE) by Zheng Gao, Christian Bird, Earl T. Barr.

We are there. Finally. Decoding Json. Things we have learned up til now are will culminate into fetching Json data from a server endpoint, and transforming that into type safe Elm to be able to use in our Elm applications.

One of the fundemental tasks of any web app, is to get, display, capture, save, manipulate, or otherwise man handle data from an http request. We are gonna dive into what that means for our model, our update function, and our sanity.