I gave an Elm Talk before the Haskell User Group Frankfurt

[alipasha]

Hi there,

on Monday I gave a Talk on Elm and FRP (I know!) before the Haskell User Group in Frankfurt Germany and it went very well. I'd like to share my experience. 

The Introduction of Syntax, Types, Union Types, Pattern Matching went with ease, that will certainly be different in front of a JavaScript crowd. I need less time for that part.

As I was showing different examples people kept mentioning "the Actor Model". 

The FRP issue is a great conversation topic and as I talked about the removal of the signals in 0.17, questions were raised on how time-sensitive modelling will happen in Elm now.

I do need to study more libraries and especially the edge cases to prepare for those kind of issues. 

The Questions kept being asked regarding Html:

1. How realistic is it to put everything in ONE Model. I tried to explain composition, but bringing up a real complex example would be nice. I did mention NoRedInk though. 

2. We need more "beautiful" Html examples, even though it's about simplicity, people assume the lack of effort in getting the Counter, the Dice and other examples that look more appealing questions if Elm is able to deal with messy CSS and browser stuff in practice.

Now, I REALLY have to get deep into CSS. :(

3. Next time I will prepare more PORT examples. Many questions if Bootstrap or a calendar widget could be combined easily in a complex web page.

Last but certainly not least:

4. Everyone seemed to know that Elm does not support Haskell like Type Classes and this added 

to the doubts if Elm could handle serious big problems. One person mentioned bio-informatics but I did mot understand the details of the problem.

One last thing:

The compiler messages and the new debugger made a great impression. 

JavaScript has not a lot of friends in the Haskell Community, but my impression was that python is less popular.

All in all everyone liked Elm and there will be future sessions comparing solutions to problems in Haskell with Elm. I am looking forward to that.

Some remarks as I was preparing for the Talk:

The Jump from 0.16 to 0.17 is huge, it's really huge; in terms of explaining Elm, in terms of thinking in Elm.

The Language-Level Reactivity with Elm Article by Richard Feldman helped a lot with my preparations.

https://www.infoq.com/articles/language-reactivity-with-elm

I personally believe the way Evan is evolving Elm is way more impressive than the invention of Elm itself. 

This is a great journey. I love it so far and I need to learn a lot more.

In case anyone is interested here are my slides, but nothing special for this group I guess.

https://github.com/1use/elm-presentation-haskell-ug-frankfurt-01-2017

Thanks for this great community

A.P.