Abstract
When I joined NoRedInk in 2013, we had a typical Ruby on Rails web application. In 2015 we introduced Elm, a pure functional programming language for building Web UIs, and it spread like wildfire to become our primary tool for front-end programming. In 2019 we have over 300,000 lines of Elm code powering the user interface our millions of users rely on.
The positive experience we had with Elm led us to seek out a pure functional language to use on the back-end, and in 2017 we introduced Haskell to our stack. This talk discusses the reasons we tried these technologies, what we hoped to get out of them compared to what we got, what went well and what didn’t, and the strategies we used to adopt them incrementally inside a mission-critical code base.
Come find out what this production transition to a purely functional stack was like!
About Richard Feldman
Richard is a functional programmer who specializes in pushing the limits of browser-based UIs. He’s built seamless-immutable, a JavaScript immutables library that seamlessly interoperates with normal JS collections; elm-css, a CSS preprocessor where you write Elm instead of CSS; and Dreamwriter, a long-form writing Web App written in Elm which works like a desktop app in the absence of an Internet connection.