Elm VS Vue.js

Recently a friend recommended me Elm, a pure functional language for developing web applications. I'd like to compare it to JavaScript and show how the functional paradigm can work in practical applications.

If you want to combine functional programming with the web i'd consider Elm which seems to have a fairly decent documentation and a good official guide.

Well, but the website tries to encourage you to use Elm. The guide explicitly asks you to "give Elm a shot and see what you think". So it seems to me that Evan does want Elm to be popular.

I really like Elm [0] and write all my side projects in it. There are many reasons I like it, but the one that probably plays best around here is that it feels like a very learn-it-for-life type language. It has a release cadence measured in years (the latest version, 0.19.10, was released in October 2019!), and a community that has adapted to match. Elm doesn't release shiny new features often, or even necessarily ever again, but it has everything I need to make every web game I could possibly think of already so that's a good thing.

[0] https://elm-lang.org/

As for other languages, I wrote one for Elm (https://elm-lang.org/) inspired by ts-rs: https://crates.io/crates/elm_rs

Also check out the follow-up issue!

negative numbers not being allowed in pattern matches ... prevents me from shooting myself in the foot

Pretty much. I keep asking people "Why not Elm?" ( https://elm-lang.org/ ) but no one has a very good answer.

The weird thing to me is that the two main customers or consumers of front-end programming (publishers and users) never see and do not care about the underlying language or implementation! Businesses and other orgs (schools, NGOs, etc.) as well as individuals (FB users, WordPress blogs, etc.) never see under the hood (except when something goes wrong or they deliberately click "View Source", eh?)

Ergo, all this whole Javascript ecosystem is solely for the developers. It's like a giant and largely irrelevant MMORG that we play that produces mostly-working websites and apps almost as a side effect.

"Change my mind?"

During the early 2010s, creating large and maintainable web applications was quite a challenge, mostly due to the sheer horrors of front-end development that developers had to face. This however was made easier by Frameworks such as React and Vue, which brought component-oriented frameworks into existence, making them an instant hit among developers. However, one developer had a better and bigger idea in mind.

PS: This post assumes prior knowledge of VueJs, your chosen backend language NodeJs or Laravel PHP, Tailwind CSS(although it can be uninstalled via npm to accommodate your desired CSS syntax), and ability to work with Shopify’s documentation based on what your app intends to do.

These days, UI frameworks tend to make heavy use of modern Javascript and utilize components and reactive patterns to handle real-time interaction. Angular, React, and Vue are now well established as the standard for what we know as modern frontend development. Alongside these, we’ve seen the rise of framework-specific UI libraries that aim to provide a “batteries included” approach to UI, with deep integration of each framework’s unique set of features. This includes Angular Material, Mantine (for React), and Vuetify.

2.) React is also a library, in some regards you could say its the equivalent of express, just that instead of being made for server side applications, it is made for frontend / client side applications. Its similar to vue, svelte and most closely, angular - under the hood react uses a diffing algorithm to only change the necessary html elements (dom elements) - it can also render html on the server with its react-dom-server apis - react is by no means a framework however as it doesn't give you any pre-defined patterns of working. You can code in any way you like and organize a react project however you like.

In contrast almost every other framework has some kind of control flow for iteration. It boggles my mind why hasn't one been introduced already into React.

Vue.js -> https://vuejs.org/

Both Vuejs and Netlify are using gradient text on their hero scetion in the homepage!

Now, concerning the language and framework for the front-end, the current leading framework is React.js, but I think Vue.js is easier to learn and to use.

In the past for UI I've used Lit (simpler things) and Vue (more complex things)