Chapter 1. Welcome to Elm
This chapter covers
- Introducing Elm to a project
- Using elm repl
- Building expressions
- Writing and importing functions
- Working with collections
Back in 2014, I set out to rewrite a side project and ended up with a new favorite programming language. Not only was the rewritten code faster, more reliable, and easier to maintain, but writing it was the most fun I’d had in over a decade of writing code. Ever since that project, I’ve been hooked on Elm.
The rewrite in question was a writing application I’d built even longer ago, in 2011. Having tried out several writing apps over the course of writing a novel, and being satisfied with none, I decided to scratch my own itch and build my dream writing app. I called it Dreamwriter.
For those keeping score: yes, I was indeed writing code in order to write prose better.
Things went well at first. I built the basic web app, started using it, and iterated on the design. Months later I’d written over fifty thousand words in Dreamwriter. If I’d been satisfied with that early design, the story might have ended there. However, users always want a better experience—and when the user and the developer are the same person, further iteration is inevitable.