On Simplicity

My personal reasoning about building the modern Web app frontend. Featuring functional reactive programming (FRP) and Elm.

Transcript

1. ON SIMPLICITY Futurice WWWeeklies July 3, 2015 @ohanhi
2. –Richard Feldman at MLOC.js 2015 FAMILIARITY GROWS OVER TIME ...but complexity is forever
3. COMPLEXITY • Things to know by heart - language, framework • Things to remember - project • Things to handle when _______
4. SIMPLICITY • Less cognitive load • Less things to go wrong • Focus
5. CODE QUALITY • Code style • Modularity, separation of concerns • Tests • Code reviews • Quick hacks
6. WEB FRONTEND
7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZqhRICne_M
8. –Brendan Eich at O'Reilly Fluent 2014 JavaScript is like a chainsaw you have in place of a hand
9. –Chris Wilson, http://bendyworks.com/ Mutability is a kind of Chekhov’s gun, it will go off by the third act simply because it is there.
10. WHAT WE DO • Forbid language features - ESLint etc. • Agree on code style - JSCS etc. • Add functional and reactive abstractions - lodash, RxJS… • Switch out the language - Coffee, Clojure, JSX… • Add static types - AtScript, TypeScript, Flow… • Add immutable structures - Immutable.js, mori…
11. → Transpile to ES5
12. FUNCTIONAL REACTIVE PROGRAMMING • Use immutable structures and global state • Describe what to do in pure functions • Subscribe to streams of input • Handle input safely
13. VISIONS OF THE FUTURE
14. –Jeremy Ashkenas, “Rise of the Transpilers” “Someone is going to unify these three different syntaxes and write a language that just addresses the web-platform directly and it’s going to be insanely popular”
15. http://www.sitepoint.com/future-programming-webassembly-life-after-javascript/ –Eric Elliot
16. ELM
17. • Immutability • Static Types & Records • Functional • Reactive - Signals • Minimal syntax • Compiles to ES5
18. COMPILATION ERRORS http://elm-lang.org/blog/compiler-errors-for-humans
19. –Richard Feldman at MLOC.js I keep having this experience where I make a major breaking refactor, recompile, fix all the compiler errors...and when I bring up Dreamwriter, everything still works! No regressions! This experience makes refactoring SO much fun!
20. RESOURCES Richard Feldman - Shipping a Production Web App in Elm Chris Wilson - Elm for the Frontend, Right Now elm-lang.org - /examples
21. –André Medeiros Ignore the popularity of a solution. Stay close to the Science.
22. Thoughts?