Luke is a JavaScript developer at Raise with experience on the front-end and in Node. At work he spends much of his time building UIs with React, Redux, and Redux Loop, and developing services with Node and Hapi. Outside of work he is an active member of the Elm community, maintaining builtwithelm.co and several open source packages including elm-http-extra and elm-verbal-expressions. He loves contributing to the Elm community by answering questions in the Elm Slack, writing blog posts, and organizing the Chicago Elm Meetup. When he's not thinking about code he likes to play the guitar, speed-run Metroid Fusion, and watch far too much TV with his girlfriend.
The Elm Architecture is the officially prescribed design pattern for building applications with Elm. Compared to the traditional MVC architecture it can be described as MVU - Model, View, Update. Reactivity is a built-in construct in Elm and so Elm allows us to strip away all of the control associated with a controller and focus entirely on how we update the model given a change in our system.
In this talk Luke will explain how the Elm architecture arises from Elm's Signals, Tasks, Tagged Unions, and stateless view functions. He will demonstrate how we can use these language constructs to represent every discrete piece of functionality as an equally discrete model, view, and update function, and how to compose them to build larger applications out of smaller ones. We will see how the Elm architecture allows us to scale to any level of complexity with ease by building our applications as fractal structures with components fully contained by other components - not just their presentation, but their model and business logic as well.
Some understanding of functional programming and in particular functional reactive programming will help to get the most out of this talk, but the general concepts work in other languages and paradigms too (although certainly not as well).
Location: Illinois B
Time: Saturday 11:00AM — Saturday 11:50AM
With the introduction of RxJS, React, Cycle, Immutable, Flow and TypeScript, and many of the new syntax features of ES6+, building JavaScript applications is evolving toward the functional reactive paradigm. The real benefit of functional programming, however, comes from using a truly functional language. Unfortunately, pure functional programming still seems to have an overly-mathematical stigma in the front-end community that can be discouraging to newcomers. Elm aims to fix all of this.
Elm is a pleasant compile-to-JS language that marries the productivity of the JavaScript environment with the productivity and guarantees of a functional language. In Elm, every value is immutable, every function is stateless and concise, every DOM update is virtual, and every app is guaranteed free from runtime exceptions. Additionally, it provides this power in a way that is accessible and easy for people who are new to functional programming to get started and become productive quickly.
In this talk, Luke will demonstrate all of the beauties of Elm, its syntax, tools, community, and hopefully convince you that the web is moving toward what Elm already provides. He will demonstrate some syntax and show some examples; cover all of the ways that Elm can make functional programming for the browser a nicer experience for anyone.
Location: Illinois B
Time: Saturday 2:00PM — Saturday 2:50PM
