Why Elm?

Book description

Among today’s frontend technologies, the Elm programming language is genuinely unique. Lightweight and easy to work with, Elm is a functional language that compiles to JavaScript with code that’s fast, hard to break, easily testable, and extremely maintainable. In this report, author Matthew Griffith provides a quick overview of Elm with emphasis on its advantages over JavaScript and other popular frontend frameworks.

Created specifically for the web frontend, Elm eliminates many of the most common pain points of frontend development. Runtime exceptions are practically nonexistent, and refactoring is largely painless because of the strength and user-friendliness of Elm’s compiler. This report explains how you can adopt Elm into your projects incrementally.

  • Learn how to read Elm’s expression-oriented code
  • Discover why data immutability is one of the key features of Elm’s type system
  • Become familiar with Elm’s variant of the Model-View-Controller architecture
  • Explore Elm tooling, including the package manager, debugger, automatic code formatter, and the testing framework
  • Compare two Elm packages—Elm CSS and Elm Style Animation—to similar frontend solutions

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Product information

  • Title: Why Elm?
  • Author(s): Matthew Griffith
  • Release date: May 2017
  • Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
  • ISBN: 9781491980002