Preface: The intention of this article is to provide an interesting and simplified starting point for introducing someone to functional programming topics. It is not intended to be a mathematically provable language or even a full featured programming language.
In this blog post I’ll be covering Elm, an up and coming functional programming language for building web application front ends. Elm compiles into JavaScript and utilizes virtual DOM technology to efficiently render web UIs. Elm focuses on simplicity for the developer with a helpful compiler and an easy to understand application architecture.
In case you haven’t yet heard of it yet, Elixir is a functional programming language (technically, a collection of macros) written in Erlang. I have been persuaded to add it to my (and, consequently, Grio’s) technical repertoire due to a good amount of recent buzz in the blogosphere (as well as some points I’ll get to later). To make sure I have a strong foundation for my Elixir learning experience, I am starting my adventure with a foray into the underlying syntax of Erlang.