Why Functional Programming Matters — The Early Days of Programming There is so much hype these days about functional programming. As you’d expect, parts of this hype is valid but in some ways the prospect of functional languages as a cure for all problems is overstated. …

It’s Become Even Easier — Overview Early this year, I taught myself to build a REST API with Phoenix and Elixir and wrote about it. This has been by far my most popular blog post ever. Now that Phoenix 1.3 is out, that article is a pretty outdated so I thought I’d take the time to…

The Elm Architecture Has You Covered — About Style Elements In my last article, I demonstrated how you could use the Elm Style Elements to build an Elm application with no CSS. Style Elements are used to separate styling of individual elements from the layout of your page. …

Life Without CSS… Is it Possible? — CSS is Not My Friend I was very intrigued when I watched Matthew Griffith’s talk at Elm Europe 2017. I’ve always steered away from diving deeply into CSS. It’s just a huge mental load for me. The language is complex, there are no guarantees that you are writing valid code and the confusion between layout…

Pattern Matching All The Way Down — I’ve been working on code to emulate a TRS-80 computer. The TRS-80 was my first platform and I think it would be fun and informative to be able to play with the internals of that computer. This is possible because the original ROMs that acted as the “operating system” are…

What if you can’t make it all impossible? — Working Around an Invalid State For the past few weeks, I’ve been walking you through the decisions I made in creating a dart scoring application. I worked hard to build a coherent and expressive set of types and tried to relentlessly stamp out invalid states. Let’s review the types I was working with last week. …

Constant Refactoring is a Good Thing — There’s No Ideal Linear Development Process Over the past few weeks, I’ve been sharing my lessons learned in developing a dart scoring application in Elm. It’s by no means a big application, but I’ve been attempting to be very formal in the way I develop it. Last week, I defined the general process I’m using. …

Starting on the Business Logic — Cleanup Up the Types In last week’s post on type-driven design, I defined the basic types required for a dart scoring application. Thanks to @marc.minnee, I have refined things even further. He suggested that I could simplify my message types quite a bit. Instead of this monstrosity, type Msg = HitFifteen…

Avoiding Primitive Obsession — Starting With More Expressive Types I think for those of us coming from the world on dynamically-typed languages, the transition to using more complex types comes slowly. My general pattern is to start a new application with pretty traditional data structures consisting of lists of records. These records are usually just a collection of primitives. …