Elm: a functional reactive programming language that compiles to JavaScript

#1

Post by Rusky » Wed, Dec 07, 2011, 1:51 AM UTC

Elm: a functional reactive programming language that compiles to JavaScript
elm-lang.org

Re: Elm: a functional reactive programming language that compiles to JavaScript

#2

Post by saiko-chriskun » Wed, Dec 07, 2011, 1:57 AM UTC

this looks really awesome ^^

Re: Elm: a functional reactive programming language that compiles to JavaScript

#3

Post by natural_order » Wed, Dec 07, 2011, 2:25 AM UTC

Something like this is badly needed to unify front-end web design and development.

Re: Elm: a functional reactive programming language that compiles to JavaScript

#4

Post by ericmoritz » Wed, Dec 07, 2011, 2:30 AM UTC

I dig that reactive programming paradigm

Re: Elm: a functional reactive programming language that compiles to JavaScript

#5

Post by Rusky » Wed, Dec 07, 2011, 2:38 AM UTC

natural_order wrote: post #3

Something like this is badly needed to unify front-end web design and development.

Or even any front-end development, web or no. I'd love to write GUIs this way.

Re: Elm: a functional reactive programming language that compiles to JavaScript

#6

Post by da02 » Wed, Dec 07, 2011, 2:43 AM UTC

Elm is extremely cool and I hope he expands on it.

Doesn't it seem like Elm could become HyperCard for the WWW, but with more powerful programming concepts?

I had a similar idea, but with a few more variations:

  * Syntax more like HyperTalk.
  * OOP/FP inspired from Factor. 
    (Which was inspired by a bunch of different languages.)
  * have it also run code on the server-side with 
    several data-store architectures to choose from.

Re: Elm: a functional reactive programming language that compiles to JavaScript

#7

Post by jphackworth » Wed, Dec 07, 2011, 3:17 AM UTC

It seems pretty neat, certainly a cool senior thesis!

One suggestion if you take this further is to add a "dictionary" or "hash table" type. For practical programming problems, that is pretty necessary.

But a really neat project - it's cool to see a functional programming take on the CoffeeScript-style compiling-to-javascript.

Re: Elm: a functional reactive programming language that compiles to JavaScript

#8

Post by mahmud » Wed, Dec 07, 2011, 3:22 AM UTC

The original paper that introduced Functional Reactive Programming was the Fran paper:

http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/dsl97...

Re: Elm: a functional reactive programming language that compiles to JavaScript

#9

Post by ericlavigne » Wed, Dec 07, 2011, 3:24 AM UTC

This surprised me: link has type (String -> String -> String), taking URL and label as arguments, and returning HTML code as a string (instead of as an Element).

Then you need to use the text function (String -> Element) to make that link appear properly on the screen.

This means that the text function (intentionally?) does not HTML-escape strings, even though examples suggest that it is the recommended way to put some unformatted text on the screen.

text seems very poorly named, especially if the goal is for HTML/CSS/Javascript to be treated like assembly. Maybe create a function called html that does what text does now, and let the text function be equivalent to (html . htmlEscape).

Looks nice overall, and I look forward to seeing how it develops. Is Elm available for download?

Re: Elm: a functional reactive programming language that compiles to JavaScript

#10

Post by clintboxe » Wed, Dec 07, 2011, 3:31 AM UTC

The email client ? :)