After reading the Reddit thread Elm and why it's not quite ready yet and getting really frustrated, i though: How about we turn it around?
What are the problems and how can the community work together to solve them?
I feel like a lot of good things are created in the Elm community but it's hard to keep track of what already exists. This Post aims to bring these together and encourage collaboration between projects.
There are three communities in elm:
Not everything gets posted on all three platforms and personally I feel like this splits the community. Personally I try to use Slack for fast Feedback, Discourse for discussions and /r/elm for news. I'm not sure if everyone does it this way.
There are actually two ways to keep up to date without needing to join these groups:
- Elm News is a website that bundles all discourse, Reddit and hacker news posts.
- Elm Weekly is a curated newsletter and gives you the highlights of every week
We actually have two lovely podcasts:
The elm-community LOVES to reference talks from the conferences, so here are all of them with their YouTube channels:
(Ordered by date)
When it comes to collections of Elm packages, the first place one might lot at is isRuslan/awesome-elm. Sadly a lot it is outdated.
For game development we have created rofrol/awesome-elm-gamedev, which is quite up-to-date.
There is definitely space for improvement. There are actually two projects that try to fix this situation:
Whereas the elm package catalog is maintained by Alex Korban, the Elm finder actually uses the direct API of Elm Packages. Sadly Elm Finder not very well-known.
To start learning Elm most would recommand the official guide. But sadly as of right now (June 2019) there is a missing example in the document: (URL Parsing. That said there is already a Pull Request. We know Evan is a busy man, so it may take some time until its merged.
Additionally, the Elm Syntax documentation is also not complete. I remember that I got quite frustrated : it felt like there are things (like pattern matching) that are used a lot in code, but there is no prober guide that tells me was this does (like the "as" expression). Another example are record constructors, they are not mentioned, neither in the elm Syntax nor in the (hidden) chapter about Records, but they are mentioned briefly in the type alias chapter of the guide.
To conclude: this is not perfect. There are additional guides that may help out, most of them cost money. Fortunately, the (Beginning Elm book)[https://elmprogramming.com] is actually free. Sadly it's still being updated to 0.19. Again this something that maybe the community as a whole could help to solve.
Elm is around long enough. There are a lot of good practices that the community has figured out. Currently, the only way for a newcomer to figure them out is to ask questions in the slack, discourse or subreddit.
Personally I felt like this needs to change, so I started a Gitbook (I have still not decided what to call it) that should serve as a collection of good practices. I would be more than happy if people would help me out.