notes.md

Notes for elm-advent-of-code

Year 2022

Day 5

• This was quite tricky because handling array or list data when then these data types are not mutable is a different paradigm of processing.
• And a common theme has been my difficulty using the Parser libraray of Elm. It really isn't terribly intuitive. The introductory documentation could be much better.

Day 6

• Just parsing a string using sets.
• Took a bit of time to think how to do this without a loop, and in this case I decided on recursion.

General

• Debugging is not a great experience in Elm. From what I can tell, there is no dedicated debugger like pdb or gdb. Instead, one is relegated to using Debug.log statements, which then pop up in the Debug console of the browser in which the program is run. It doesn't come out of the console output! Took me a while to figure that out.

Deployment

Very little guidance out there on how to actually deploy an Elm application. Nor any indication that the most standard Elm architecture is a SPA (Single Page Application).

After a lot of stumbling around, I eventually ended up with what I think is a way forward, involving these components.

• The way to build with just elm is elm make src/Main.elm --optimize --output=elm.js
• rtfeldman-elm-example adds another step involving Uglify, but I don't this is particularly necessary for my simple use case (???)
• then, I found the simple index.html that loads this from the base template that elm-spa produces
• finally, I will need to connect this up to Netlify using the guidance at elm-land

This takes inspiration mostly from these sources:

• rtfeldman-elm-example
• elm-spa-tool
• elm-land