‘Iacta alea est’

An Elm Playlist

Poots Pushes Presentations

Tutorials, blog posts and articles are great for getting down to the nitty-gritty but I find conference talks and podcasts a useful way to get a high-level overview. Here are some videos and a couple of podcasts that you should watch, and listen to, to get a taste for Elm.

I’ve put the videos in the order I think they should be watched and emphasised the top three if you are limited for time. All of them are worth watching if you are serious about Elm or want to be persuaded.

Elm Conference Talks

Let’s be mainstream! User-focused design in Elm
Evan Czaplicki Curry on Conf Closing Keynote (July 2015).

The first is by Elm author Evan Czaplicki himself. He touches on the unnecessary inaccessibility of functional programming which restricts it to a niche existence and how Elm was designed with exactly the opposite in mind: to make it easy and fun to write in a typed, functional language; and to promote it precisely because of its very real practical benefits and not just its abstract, theoretical virtues.

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Make the Back-End Team Jealous: Elm in Production
Richard Feldman Strange Loop, September 2015.

The second is by Elm’s irrepressible cheerleader, Richard Feldman. He is the Front-End Lead at NoRedInk, and one of the first to usher Elm into production. He had previously (successfully) experimented with Elm on his open source writing web application, DreamWriter.

His talk is a tale of the one who laughs last, laughs loudest. If you couple his enthusiasm with Elm’s future, I think he’ll be laughing for a long time yet.

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Effects as Data
Richard Feldman Reactive Conference, November 2015.

Richard returns with another instalment at the recently held Reactive Conference in Europe. This is the practical argument for Elm from first principles. His delivery is masterful, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen an audience break into spontaneous applause at the mere mention of a programming language.

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Other good talks are:

• “Functional Principles in React” by the engaging and exuberant Jessica Kerr, holding up Elm as the logical and desirable conclusion to React and Redux.
• A general talk by Evan on, “Functional Reactive Programming in Elm” at the Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference in April 2014.
• Along with his more advanced talk on, “Controlling Time and Space: understanding the many formulations of FRP” at Strange Loop, September 2014.

Podcasts with Elm

The two podcast episodes are from JavaScript Jabber and Ruby Rogues, two of my favourite tech podcasts. Both feature a double-act of Evan Czaplicki and Richard Feldman:

JavaScript Jabber, Episode 175
Elm with Evan Czaplicki and Richard Feldman

Ruby Rogues, Episode 212
Elm with Evan Czaplicki and Richard Feldman

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Enjoy, and please let me know if there are any good talks or podcasts I’ve missed.

—Tuesday 10th November 2015