atomic VS elm-architecture-tutorial

I wanted ClojureScript, without transpilation, in the browser so badly I implemented much of it in plain JS. But JS still lacks first-class protocols (although there is a T39 proposal for them) so I have to implement protocols first. And I can tell you from having implemented much of Clojure myself in plain JS that it's protocols all the way down. 80% of my library are types and their protocols.

I've watched a lot of talks, but it was Rich Hickey's which most captivated me and, ultimately, inspired big change in how I coded. After discovering Clojure I was so desiring FP (i.e. ClojureScript) in the browser without a build step and hoard of dependencies that I wrote my own library.

I fell in love with Clojure and ported most of the tools to plain ol' JavaScript. I stole reactives and FRP from Elm. I write a functional core then wrap it with an imperative shell. It's been my mainstay for 10 years now.

What I did was looked past the languages at the ideas and saw they could be applied everywhere, including JavaScript. Take a look at my example programs (via prior link) and you can see Clojure applied to the JavaScript/browser realm.

I have found that the amount of code needed to support any page/app need not be massive. I have implemented modern board games with 250-300KB of js and the core lib I use on all my projects maxes out around 250KB, unminified. The lib itself is built on the premise of build avoidance.

I do JavaScript most of the time, but I was so inspired that I ported the Clojure mindset into the web development world so I could use it even in the absence of Clojure. I know there's ClojureScript, but I wanted the goodness without transpilation.

So I don't even do Clojure per se. I do Clojure in JavaScript without ClojureScript.

I use functional core, imperative shell. It would have you write a core which is a pure simulation. Write everything in the core using immutable data and pure functions. I elaborate on that here, along with examples.

I'm learning Haskell right now, pure functional language, but if anyone is interested, Elm is based on Haskell and much easier to learn. Elm is a web development language that compiles to JS. https://guide.elm-lang.org/

Elm is a different approach that compiles into JavaScript. In the extreme case, you have Emscripten which will compile many language into JavaScript but will feel really clumsy compared to using JavaScript in a lot of cases.

And if you want to stay in the UI realm, Elm is a good introduction into functional programming.

If you want to get better at data structures you should strongly consider learning a functional language. A huge part of functional programming is manipulating data structures. The language Elm is a great place to start for you since it's frontend specific. For example, check out the doc page for the Dict data type and see if that kind of stuff is what you're looking for.

https://guide.elm-lang.org/ for a high level guide, and an unstyled button example https://elm-lang.org/examples/buttons.

I hope this tiny guide was helpful, and that you learned something new today. If you want to learn more about Elm, you should check out the official guide or say hello in the Elm Slack #beginners channel

https://guide.elm-lang.org/ is always a solid example for me

After going through the whole Introductory Guide to the Elm Language and reading the Elm in Action book, I already felt quite comfortable developing webapps in this paradigm. I liked Elm so much that I started a project to teach programming to beginners using this language and made the first classes available on the website elm.dev.br (in Brazilian Portuguese).