In front-end development, we have a library overload problem. The community is telling us that best practices revolve around pulling in even more libraries to our JavaScript application; those libraries and tools often look a bit like this: Redux, React, Babel, Flow, Immutable/Ramda/Lodash, ESLint, and competing testing frameworks.
While the community is definitely on to something – with immutability, un-encapsulation, embracing lambdas, typing (gradual or otherwise), and focusing on proper state management – what if there was an alternative, a frictionless language that wrapped up all of these concepts into its core without the need of bolting more libraries on top of JavaScript to make it behave in a way that it doesn’t come out of the box?
In this talk, we will do a brief fly-by over how and why front-end has evolved, present Elm as an alternative to all these little moving pieces in the current front-end toolbelt, and talk about the strengths of doing it at the language level through some live coding examples.