So I think there’s this idea—I’m not sure where it comes from, maybe Richard will know better — but that it’s all Elm or no Elm. But let’s talk with Evan and Richard. It’s better than my Java code partly because I’m a bunch of years older, and way more experienced, but also because I made a language. The right way to bundle things up is to create these strong abstractions around particular pieces of information. That’s probably a good place to close things down for this show. [00:43:54.07] I’m not sure if I have the same perspective as Richard on this. Richard, like we said, we had you on the show back in January; that’s episode 191. Evan created Elm, a functional language for web programming. In the past few weeks, I have been talking with Richard more about how they use Elm at NoRedInk, so the following is the result of our experiences and discussions. Because the initial dream was “What if there was a better way?” and it turns out that’s a very hard problem. Someday we’re going to talk to somebody, and they’re going to be like, “Oh, we have more than you do.” [laugh] I’m going to be like, “Aw man, is that so important?” We still have Evan. And no matter what, that helps us out. They don’t care about testing. Often I’ll be like, “Oh, that’s such a good way to present this.”. It’s like, “Hey, we’re talking Elm architecture and bringing it to JavaScript.”. One thing that’s been interesting as I’ve been working on Elm is coming back to the same thing, except many years later. I just made it a lot worse by componentizing everything. So we’ll talk about what that means, how you can actually get started with that, and then we have a roundtable Q&A - just a bunch of questions for you all that we’ll ask to close out the show. We use Elm a lot at NoRedInk; we love it. It’s a question of risk. It comes from this idea of how do we things from a functional way, without introducing all these imperative techniques that are typically used? That’s actually going to be much, much worse. I’m not a Clojure person so I haven’t been to his Clojure conferences, but I just assumed based on the quality of the other stuff that he’s done that they’re awesome, too. The first release of Elm came with many examples and an online editor that made it easy to try out in a web browser. Guys, thanks so much for joining us, and taking time to talk about Elm today. It’s still quite an immature API, but it’s the building blocks of what every Elm program is built on behind-the-scenes. People can go back and listen to that one as well, to get your backstory. And of course, as pretty much always turns out to be the answer, the answer turned out to be, do it incrementally. Give us the timespan in months, perhaps, before you had your thing that you could vertically center your picture. NoRedInk switched to Elm about two years ago, and 250k+ lines later, they still have not had to scramble to fix a confusing runtime exception in production.details [laughter] There are times when I would get frustrated about this kind of thing. It is popular among web developers who like it for building user interfaces. The alternatives often are, “Well, what if we had mutable state in this component?” and it’s like, “Well, this language doesn’t have mutable states, so that’s not an option.”, Yeah. We don’t know where this term is, maybe you meant one of these other ones, maybe there was a misspelling… In theory, we can just do these suggestions and let you pick one really easily, like you click a button, or something. Czaplicki never set out to rewrite the rules of computer programming—he just got tired of feeling frustrated. We have tons and tons of functions working on that thing, and they’re not all just taking the entire model. He is an open source engineer at NoRedInk, where the front-end code includes more than 200k lines of Elm. It’s unclear where that will go, but that’s some thoughts. The term came to mean “we have interactivity and we have a map function.” Basically, it’s functional and it’s reactive, so we’re going to use this terminology. Chapter three just came out, it’s available for early access. If you look at my contribution graph — and I did look at it recently, because I was curious about this — basically it just takes a nosedive after I did this, because I just made my own codebase no longer joyful to maintain. We are up against our next break. It’s looking spectacular. I think that as a user of Elm, or as a casual observer of Elm who’s thinking about using Elm, anything that you could simplify - mental models, or even the codes that I have to write… I’m all for that. Where you can actually read it in line with you writing it? And pre-0.17, that needed signals, so essentially you needed a big conceptual framework to be able to use that. NoRedInk was founded in 2012 and is a web based platform used to help students improve writing skills. I had this feeling that I was working on… In theory, I was in the best environment to have a good experience, and the kind of things that were difficult were just comically bad. At some point we realized, “This actually can cover everything that people need, just flat-out.” It is generating this signal graph underneath, but messing with that isn’t actually essential complexity. I’ve gotten over it just because it’s silly to be upset about it, because it’s still really positive for Elm, even if no one knows that there’s any direct inspiration; even if there’s not. Well, yeah. Oh, yeah! If you really trace it back, it’s much older than that. So the Emerging Languages Camp—ElmConf is in the same spot as that one. Six months from now, a year from now, come back; bring Evan, or not… Let’s talk about Elm again!” And then maybe six months to the day, Richard, that email came in and you’re like, “Hey, it’s six months, let’s do this.” It was that easy. So I say, “We have no runtime exceptions,” and people are disbelieving because that sounds too awesome to be true. It’s going to be tough too, to imagine - what you can do and what you should do is two different things, right? I generally categorize 0.17 as, we learned what it would look like to write good code, and we just made Elm accommodate that better. Often when people are trying to present this, they’ll say things like, “If you can have a type-safe program and it’s a sound type system, and you get these properties, and these properties are really nice.” Essentially, what we realized is you can just say, “These programs don’t get runtime errors.” That’s the summary of all the theory that people have been working on for decades. Our software helps English teachers, and their students answer millions of questions per day on our site. Compilers should be assistance, not adversaries.” Jerod mentioned earlier you’re famous for your polite and helpful error messages or compiler error messages, but you also say compilers should not just detect bugs, but they should also help you understand why there is a bug. Rollbar – Put errors in their place! Unfamiliarity with functional programming in general, immutability, the general messaging, and some of the complicated things which you guys have been making less complicated. That was the initial vision. It’s like, teach somebody the box model; you think they get it, but still… Even then, you’re like, “That’s the box model? We spend almost all of our front-end coding time writing Elm. If you trace the roots of the term to the academic literature, it means a very particular thing. Harness the power of your relationships with RelSci Pro, the powerful platform for identifying relationship-driven business opportunities and connections that can propel your career forward. And they've been writing software for English teachers. So I’d take these inputs, I’d merge them all together, I update my model, I send it out to My View. I wouldn’t frame it exactly like Richard’s database thing, but I would say when you have 20 components with their own individual state, you end up in a situation where you’re synchronizing state between all these different things. That’s weird.” I had this experience a couple of times. How do you upgrade a large codebase? There are concepts and terms that exist, and the fact that I don’t get them yet makes me doubt what I already know. Elm is the name of a purely functional language first designed by Evan Czaplicki in 2012. I think Richard’s got an alarm set or something like that. I want you guys to speak to that. The end results sound amazing, but what you just described there sounds like, in certain ways, a big ball of mud. Guys, tell us the details of this. Those other languages have all been around, and I’ve gotten interested in them over the years. Or maybe a common scenario, but for the kind of things I write in Elm, it’s different. It never bothers me when it’s properly cited, right? evancz. Richard mentioned components. The way I write a program in Elm or similar languages is I start with a file and I essentially let it grow until I notice things that are used in many places or things that are sort of related concepts. I didn’t realize that you could do that. That’s been one of the things, the most valuable kind of feedback, but also just really fun to… I love it when someone surprises you with a thing you didn’t know Elm could do. I’ve recently been working on a little Expando. Scott Fradkin Flexion. What’s happening at ElmConf? I counted yesterday, that’s what it is right now. So when React comes out, they’re coming with this, “What if your views work in this particular way?” and it looks quite similar, but it’s a case of co-invention, as far as I can tell. The difference in how the workshops go has been extremely dramatic. We were just taking the next step based on what we’d observed, what people wanted to do. You can’t put an onClick handler on that, you don’t have access to the document directly, so how do you do that? Sure, at least from my perspective as a web developer. I’m very interested in seeing how far we can go with that in that direction. In our case it meant updates come in and we handle them in a certain way. It’s not really a huge change, and I think I’m pretty deliberate about “How can I prove things and make an important change without disrupting everyone’s stuff?”. I don’t see anything like that. What we noticed is people were setting up the same programs, right? So on the walk back to the office we were just chatting, and I was like, “I bet I can hide all of that with a library before you can get back to work.” So I walked upstairs and did it, and he walked back to his office, and I had it out there. I think it’s great, but there might be some scenario… A big thing for me is Elm isn’t interesting unless it’s the best tool for the job, and it’s my goal to do that. I mean, it’s the short version, but it’s like… I’ve definitely used systems in the past, where it’s the way they achieved reliability was by pushing it all onto the programmer, but I think it’s important to note that Elm achieves reliability by making it really nice. What I’ve noticed is that it’s almost entirely a social… All the challenges are social. That’s the academic side of things. I was like, “Oh my gosh, the whole world’s going to be different.”. But specifically, to be very explicit about this, every single Rollbar error we’ve seen in the past, ever since we’ve introduced Elm, the fix has always been in 100% of the cases not changing any Elm code. But just looking at the interest around Elm - because you guys have a lot of interest - I think the features are super-compelling. [00:04:04.10] Bertrand Le Roy talking about .NET Core, and a whole bunch more. We’ve got Evan Czaplicki and Richard Feldman we’re going to introduce here in just a second, but his is a catch-up show. Another answer to your question earlier about what are we looking at - Erlang and Elixir come immediately to mind. There’s actually a funny connection, which is the first talk I ever did I believe was at Emerging Languages Camp, which was the day before Strange Loop, a couple years ago. So this is a big thing that I’ve been seeing recently…. Elm was initially developed by a functional programmer by the name of Evan Czaplicki. And my alternate phrasing of that is that before, you would to use signals for that, and signals in some way were tough to weave into the basic Elm architecture that everyone wanted to write. In a sense, I can have two independent components, and they can have no shared anything. If you look at React homepage, they don’t say, “Your first render”, they say, “Your first component.” The word ‘component’ — I did this search, too. Possibly the hardest, honestly. So I’ll move that out to a module. I’d say this is similar to how we learn a lot of things in Elm. You mentioned how React community is moving more towards some of Elm’s ideas. And then we started to grow that, and grow that, and grow that.” Or, “We have this little page over here, and we thought we’d give it a try.”. It’s very reliable, very easy maintain. Now add to that I do some mutation. Very few other languages take that as seriously, I think, as you do. Let’s leave it there, fellas. RelSci Relationships are individuals Evan Czaplicki likely has professional access to. You talked earlier about the roadblocks to adoption, and the various things you have to deal with. Evan Czaplicki originally designed Elm as his thesis in 2012 and currently works full time on Elm at NoRedInk. We’re talking around them, but can you lay it all out there for us? But yet, people have this reflex that they feel like they need to do it, like if they don’t do it, they’re doing something wrong; because in object-oriented programming, that’s what you’re supposed to do, but it’s not true in Elm. It’s just really cool to start to see what people are up to and how I can help. Well, it’s been an emotional journey. It’s a mistake to credit me with this; the ability to find this class of errors this way and rule them out entirely; it goes back to the ‘70s. How do I deal with these different third-party things?” That’s where I believe signals, and now subscriptions, play in that realm, and that was an area that I was confused about Elm. [laughs] So yeah, that definitely has been a sort of, “How can we make this fun?” Something you’re proud to have. Actually /examples has a ton of examples there as well, everything from effects to even types, recursion… A bunch of stuff that’s available to dig through and see how it actually lays out, and play with it. Almost all of those function will work out is going to be m little. But the thing that I built — it was inspiring, and the sidebar the... Web and mobile apps seriously, I believe Jose Valim of Elixir was at that Emerging languages Camp, well! Having to write modular code is written in its own syntax, and everything was good, but ’. Concurrency in particular, so essentially you needed a big ball of mud we love it for my book Elm... 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