Front-End development with GHCJS / Intro to the Elm lang

Hello Haskellers,

In coordination with Vancouver's Elm Meetup, next meeting is going to be all about the Front-End.

Tavis Rudd will introduce GHCJS (https://github.com/ghcjs/ghcjs), a complete Haskell to JavaScript compiler, based on GHC. GHCJS has been quietly in development since 2010. It has recently become a viable option for front-end development, with the addition of seamless Cabal and Stack integration, a browser or node based REPL and a growing ecosystem of libraries such as react-flux (https://bitbucket.org/wuzzeb/react-flux), reflex-frp (https://github.com/reflex-frp/reflex) and shine (https://github.com/fgaz/shine). We'll explore its installation and basic usage, rich feature-set, performance and a few examples then compare it with other Haskell like front-end languages such as Elm and Purescript.

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Roman Gonzalez will introduce Elm, an opinionated language that is inspired on a simplified Haskell syntax. Elm provides all the guarantees that good statically typed languages give, plus:

• An architecture that enforces correct design from the get-go

• A set of libraries that use types to ensure foreseeable errors are always dealt with

• Futuristic user experience on tooling for developers (error messages that are actually helpful)

• Semantic versioning guarantees from package manager

We will explore Elm's architecture, and go through a few examples, we will also cover limitations in comparison to other languages.