Chris talked about Elm, which he subtitled “JavaScript for people who like Haskell not JavaScript”.
However, he immediately explained that Elm is not like Haskell, and isn’t intended to be compared to Haskell, and that it is aimed at JavaScript developers not Haskell developers, and avoids the community avoids using Haskell terminology. This is intended to help increase the uptake of the language.
However, it is a pure functional language, and does look quite Haskell-ish: for example, it supports pattern matching, immutability, and so on. It is event-driven.
One thing it concentrates on is having good error messages. It will even do things like identify references to variables that don’t exist, and suggest what you might have intended. It’s also helpful that there’s an Elm plugin for IntelliJ IDEA.
Like most modern JavaScript frameworks, it uses a virtual DOM, to make it faster.
There is a time-travelling debugger, which is a very cool feature, but Chris didn’t use it in practice.
It has automatic semantic versioning, so it updates the major version automatically when existing signatures change. However, the Elm language itself has changed significantly in minor versions, so you can’t depend on code for older Elm versions being compatible. This was frustrating for working in the language – finding older libraries that hadn’t been updated, and older examples that were out of date.
You can incrementally rewrite an existing JavaScript codebase to Elm, on a file-by-file basis. Chris wasn’t sure how compatible Elm output is with older browsers.
There are currently no books (although there will be later this year). There is a “try elm” site that is good.
It’s primarily aimed at interactive UIs, and games.
Chris’s sample Elm code is at http://nespera.github.io/elm-slide/. However, he hasn’t actually completed the game, because it’s too hard.
Then, Loic talked about Punishment Driven Development. He talked about reasons why companies punish people, and the effects of that punishment. He described the importance of understanding why people are behaving as they do, and that sometimes you may need to change your own behaviour to work with them in order to achieve your objectives. Then, he talked about the axioms of Punishment Driven Development, and contrasted them with People Driven Development.