4 ms·

By the way, can anyone suggest a good zero-to-Elm tutorial/course/book/whatever for people with no web frontend experience (coming from desktop GUI dev) to get

By the way, can anyone suggest a good zero-to-Elm tutorial/course/book/whatever for people with no web frontend experience (coming from desktop GUI dev) to get on board with Elm web GUI apps development quickly?

lf-non 4y ago
Tangentially related, because it covers the F# port of Elm (called Elmish), but Zaid's Elmish Book is pretty good. https://zaid-ajaj.github.io/the-elmish-book https://zaid-ajaj.github.io/the-elmish-book
roebk 4y ago
As a free resource then https://elmprogramming.com/ https://elmprogramming.com/ does a good job of going beyond the official Elm guide. For far as books are concerned, Elm in Action by Richard Feldman and Programming Elm: Build Safe and Maintainable Front-End Applications by Jeremy Fairbank. Best of luck on your journey!
cardanome 4y ago
Your best bet would be the frontendmasters Elm workshop by Richard Feldman who is an awesome teacher: https://frontendmasters.com/courses/intro-elm/ https://frontendmasters.com/courses/intro-elm/ (Don't worry, 2018 is still up to date. Elm moves slowly.) Though absolutely no web frontend experience might prove difficult. I think you can get pretty far with just learning Elm but it is not a common case that is well supported by any learning material I am aware of. For general Elm stuff this site helped my quite a lot: https://elmprogramming.com/ https://elmprogramming.com/ There isn't that much good learning material. It is important to get comfortable with the official docs. Especially the standard library that you find here: https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/elm/core/latest/ https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/elm/core/latest/ (Yeah, the standard library is the core package. This is where you find the fundamental building blocks. When I first learned Elm it took me way too much time until I figured it should look under packages.)
girishso 4y ago
Official Elm Guide itself will take you far, https://guide.elm-lang.org/ https://guide.elm-lang.org/. After that you can try https://www.udemy.com/course/elm-the-complete-guide/ https://www.udemy.com/course/elm-the-complete-guide/.
bbkane 4y ago
Before you commit too much time to learning Elm, please understand that Elm has somewhat unique cultural values. The Elm leadership team has a very specific vision for how Elm should be used and actively discourage alternate visions (in particular for JavaScript interop). In addition, it's difficult to know how the language will change or propose changes to the language. There is no public roadmap and GitHub issues (even for bugs) are ignored for years. Here are two examples of where people felt forced to migrate their project to a different language: https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/ https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/ https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/reason-town/elm-to-ocaml-technical-debt-CmOoJxgA0LQ/ https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/reason-town/elm-to-ocam... I'm not saying to avoid Elm. It's a beautiful language that makes UI programming fun. Just don't put 6 months of nights and weekends trying to learn it like I did for a big side project without understanding these constraints.
- cardanome 4y ago
  To be fair, Elm is also very stable and has not seen any new release since 2019. Not for lack of maintenance but simple because the author does not consider any of those bugs to be of need for immediate fixes. Plus communication has been, that Elm will probably stay mostly the same for a long time. It just doesn't have the churn that plagues the rest of JS-world. Elm is an absolute dictatorship but that is hardly that unique in the programming language world. There is also Gren https://gren-lang.org/ https://gren-lang.org/ if you want to have a (probably?) more open fork. But, yes Elm is a language build for very specific purposes with very strong opinions about how it should be used. If you have a project that fits the use case it will be awesome otherwise just don't.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  There's essentially an F# implementation now that's under active development right? I haven't used it and forget the name, but last time I looked into it it, it seemed well-regarded and the people using it like it.
  - bbkane 4y ago
    See https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdo4fOcmZ0oV2uhlVIItfXxuRXsv-gXD5 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdo4fOcmZ0oV2uhlVIItf... for last years .NET Conf with some F# -> web frameworks. They look really nice, but I haven't tried them yet.

lf-non 4y ago

Tangentially related, because it covers the F# port of Elm (called Elmish), but Zaid's Elmish Book is pretty good. https://zaid-ajaj.github.io/the-elmish-book https://zaid-ajaj.github.io/the-elmish-book

roebk 4y ago

As a free resource then https://elmprogramming.com/ https://elmprogramming.com/ does a good job of going beyond the official Elm guide. For far as books are concerned, Elm in Action by Richard Feldman and Programming Elm: Build Safe and Maintainable Front-End Applications by Jeremy Fairbank. Best of luck on your journey!

cardanome 4y ago

Your best bet would be the frontendmasters Elm workshop by Richard Feldman who is an awesome teacher: https://frontendmasters.com/courses/intro-elm/ https://frontendmasters.com/courses/intro-elm/ (Don't worry, 2018 is still up to date. Elm moves slowly.) Though absolutely no web frontend experience might prove difficult. I think you can get pretty far with just learning Elm but it is not a common case that is well supported by any learning material I am aware of. For general Elm stuff this site helped my quite a lot: https://elmprogramming.com/ https://elmprogramming.com/ There isn't that much good learning material. It is important to get comfortable with the official docs. Especially the standard library that you find here: https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/elm/core/latest/ https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/elm/core/latest/ (Yeah, the standard library is the core package. This is where you find the fundamental building blocks. When I first learned Elm it took me way too much time until I figured it should look under packages.)

girishso 4y ago

Official Elm Guide itself will take you far, https://guide.elm-lang.org/ https://guide.elm-lang.org/. After that you can try https://www.udemy.com/course/elm-the-complete-guide/ https://www.udemy.com/course/elm-the-complete-guide/.

bbkane 4y ago

Before you commit too much time to learning Elm, please understand that Elm has somewhat unique cultural values. The Elm leadership team has a very specific vision for how Elm should be used and actively discourage alternate visions (in particular for JavaScript interop). In addition, it's difficult to know how the language will change or propose changes to the language. There is no public roadmap and GitHub issues (even for bugs) are ignored for years. Here are two examples of where people felt forced to migrate their project to a different language: https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/ https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/ https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/reason-town/elm-to-ocaml-technical-debt-CmOoJxgA0LQ/ https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/reason-town/elm-to-ocam... I'm not saying to avoid Elm. It's a beautiful language that makes UI programming fun. Just don't put 6 months of nights and weekends trying to learn it like I did for a big side project without understanding these constraints.

cardanome 4y ago
To be fair, Elm is also very stable and has not seen any new release since 2019. Not for lack of maintenance but simple because the author does not consider any of those bugs to be of need for immediate fixes. Plus communication has been, that Elm will probably stay mostly the same for a long time. It just doesn't have the churn that plagues the rest of JS-world. Elm is an absolute dictatorship but that is hardly that unique in the programming language world. There is also Gren https://gren-lang.org/ https://gren-lang.org/ if you want to have a (probably?) more open fork. But, yes Elm is a language build for very specific purposes with very strong opinions about how it should be used. If you have a project that fits the use case it will be awesome otherwise just don't.
giraffe_lady 4y ago
There's essentially an F# implementation now that's under active development right? I haven't used it and forget the name, but last time I looked into it it, it seemed well-regarded and the people using it like it.
- bbkane 4y ago
  See https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdo4fOcmZ0oV2uhlVIItfXxuRXsv-gXD5 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdo4fOcmZ0oV2uhlVIItf... for last years .NET Conf with some F# -> web frameworks. They look really nice, but I haven't tried them yet.