Yesterday Tenor gave an Elm workshop at Recurse. It was probably one of the best programming workshops I have attended. At recuse there are a bunch of elm-ers (is that what you call elm programmers) and so I hope to find someone to pair with.

Many years ago I looked at elm to use for the front end to my company site Print all Over Me. We ended up using react because the ecosystem was too young. This was like 2015. Fast forward 2018 we moved everything back to shopify  so it really did not even matter! But what I did learn is that although I can program in React, I don’t love it. There is too much boilerplate and I think user defined tags (components) are too  OOD. I am a functional kinda gal.

The workshop Tenor gave is on github and I highly recommend it. Basically you just fill in the TODOs in the different sections and learn elm. I asked Tenor if there was something like this for Haskell, he said no and I cried (inside).   I love Haskell because it is a programming language like a formal language.  I feel like I am writing grammars when I write Haskell (which I do very poorly).   On a site note it would be interesting to look at grammars and Sanskrit – since this is a language generated by a grammar.  Grammars and generally descriptive not generative.

Elm I like, it is like Haskell, and like Scheme (my first true love). Functional, modular, not a lot of code. Sadly there is no WASM for elm, but apparently it is in the works.  There is a web3js elm package so for any future web dev for Prayer coin and I going to use elm.  Life is too short for boilerplate.

I’m going to take this opportunity to just dump a few things down that have come across my ‘docket’ and that I have found interesting.

Time Spirals  – great visualizations made by a Recurser shared on zulip

Compromise Cool and ml5js – Machine Learning on the web

IOS and Rust  Even if I never build an IOS app again this helped me understand how rust plugs into different code ecosystems

Racket  a language for making domain specific languages – not sure what I will use this for – if for anything – ever – but it seems cool!

I am almost done with the book on psychoanalysis technique. Dream is the royal road to the unconscious. What does that mean?  Maybe it is the most direct route? The Route with the cleanest path? The most travelled path?  Royal in what way? According to Wikipedia, the first royal road was in Persia and was rebuilt from a perhaps less royal road by Darius the Great.  It was made to aid in communication. This is perhaps different from logistics or deployment as the Interstate (and Autobahn) were made.  But then perhaps our technologically complex world is about converging communication with action (logistics).  The royal road is a easy way to communicate. It is the SMS to the unconscious.  Its a great metaphor.