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Elm

• Experience
  • Loving that it's a /small/, opinionated DSL that reminds me a lot of Haskell
  • The developer tools are excellent and very helpful, which makes this pleasant
  • Documentation is spread across versions, which can be a little tricky when reading tutorials
  • UI development might actually be pleasant for me, this time
• Shorter overviews
  • https://www.curry-software.com/en/blog/elm_web_development_without_html_css_or_js/
  • https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/elm/
  • https://elm-lang.org/docs/syntax
  • https://guide.elm-lang.org/webapps/
• CSS in Elm?
  • https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/rtfeldman/elm-css/latest/
• Elm setup
  • Use a =Browser.application= from the beginning to really build a web-app
  • Elm-live works really well: enough that I prefer it to elm-reactor to avoid manual refreshes
  • Within emacs
    • lsp-mode with elm-language-server
    • used the package exec-path-from-shell to make sure the language server was launched with the correct path
    • elm-mode works well, particularly for indentation
  • Explicitly added =elm-stuff= to =.gitignore=
• Elm internals?
  • List implementation: look at this by generating code through the compiler
    • The code is surprisingly readable
    • Looks like a direct translation to javascript, eg. F2 takes a function and makes it resemble haskell
    • I'm a little bit surprised at good performance in this case because Elm is spending a lot of VM memory, functions, etc.
      • Presumably v8 simply absorbs it all?
    • Implementation of cons:

function _List_Cons(hd, tl) { return { $: '::', a: hd, b: tl }; }

• Real examples
  • https://github.com/rtfeldman/elm-spa-example

— Kunal