this episode was made possible thanks to Hugh mio Hugh mio is the market leader and will some logging and analyzing data visit Hewitt come from all welcome to another episode of the go to book club earlier today we had a wonderful conversation with Richard Feldman and Thomas Integris Richard is the author of Elm in action Thomas asleep developer at yo-yo and one of the very first and early adopters of Elm we kicked off the conversation by asking Richard what is Elm and will it eventually take over the world what is El Sol Elm is my favorite programming language it's it's a language for building web apps building web app you eyes so specifically like building UIs in the browser and generally it's used for building web applications as opposed to for example just adding a little bit of interactivity for a static page so Elm compiles to JavaScript so you can use it instead of JavaScript also it has JavaScript Interop so if you want you can use it in conjunction with JavaScript the most popular way that people introduce Elm to an existing code base is that they will start off with an existing JavaScript code base and like react or angular review or something like that and then they'll introduce just a little bit of elm and then see it grow and grow and grow and then maybe eventually the sort of shifts to where their code base becomes majority Elm and then eventually you know almost all or entirely all Elm that's what we did at my job back in NUMBER_TOKEN and so now five years later we have somewhere around NUMBER_TOKEN thousand lines of elm code and very very little almost no remaining legacy JavaScript code I'm still a little bit so yeah it's a it's a type-check language it's purely functional and it's it's got a lovely user experience I think wait LM eventually take over the world that's a good question personally I think that Elm will become popular but not the most popular I think it's it's sort of seen as slow and steady growth kind of like Python did so Python came out in like the NUMBER_TOKENs but initially it was not a very widely used language is just kind of slowly and steadily grew and then it became used in more and more different domains and then eventually it became quite popular now it's it's sort of among the most popular languages but I think when it comes to building applications in the browser it's gonna be it would take something really serious of a change for something that's not a javascript dialect to like take over the world as it work javascript has so much momentum having said that for me personally like having spent a lot of time with elm now I just can't imagine myself taking a JavaScript or type script or CoffeeScript job ever again I mean if I'm building a web app I'm doing it an L and I think that while also thinking that Elm is not going to take over the world because as we all know popularity is determined by a lot more things than just sort of technical merit so I think it's it's a great tool for me to use and I'm very happy to teach it to other people but at the same time I don't think it's gonna be number one in terms of popularity that's my prediction at any rate well maybe comparing it to Python is not the best comparison either right because that's a
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