Branching Out with Elm: Functional Programming for your Frontend Toolkit

Elm is a functional language that compiles to JavaScript. While functional programming can feel and sound intimidating, Elm creators and maintainers have made it a priority from the beginning to make it easy and fun to get started. Elm offers so many benefits:

Clear, helpful documentation and a thorough get-started guide. Amazing tooling. Elm’s compiler offers the world’s most helpful error messaging. Really. No run-time errors! Clear architecture that makes it easy to maintain structure as your app grows. A wonderful, supportive and inclusive community. Understanding Elm’s Architecture is a GREAT way to gain deeper understanding of JavaScript and React (for me, studying Elm was the key to my understanding React).

In this talk, I’ll offer an introduction to Elm. We’ll play in the Elm REPL to go over key concepts of the core language (values, functions and tuples...oh my!), and go over the Elm Architecture. Then we’ll walk step-by-step through installing and building a simple user interface with Elm.