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Frequently-asked questions (FAQ) about the project

Note: this FAQ does not cover the syntax, semantics, or design of the Primer programming language, nor does it cover this project's accompanying Primer language server project, primer. It is only an FAQ for questions about this project, its React components, and its web application.

Does this project support tablets and phones?

Yes. The Primer programming language, and our implementation of it, in particular, were specifically designed with modern computing platforms in mind, including tablets, phones, and other touch-based UIs. Specifically:

  • The application's UI/UX has been designed from the start for touch-based interactions. For example, we've intentionally avoided any reliance on hover modalities, or other pointer-based interface affordances.

  • Our structure editor, combined with the Primer language's integrated support for atomic editing actions, requires very little typing. For the most part, students only need to use a keyboard when giving names to types, terms, modules, and programs; or when searching for them.

  • By developing for the web, our application is available on practically every general-purpose computing device in use today.

  • Because most of the computing-intensive tasks in our implementation can be done server-side, even very low-performance devices can be used to develop and run Primer programs. This also translates to less battery drain on mobile devices.

Note that phone screen sizes make for challenging UX issues for any programming environment, let alone a visual one with lots of UI "chrome," so for version 1.0, developing Primer programs on a phone, while possible, will probably not be particularly ergonomic. We'll make good UX on phones a higher priority after the 1.0 release of the web app.

Why is this project composed of a collection of React components? Why not a native mobile application, for example?

Please see our primer FAQ for a more complete answer, but in a nutshell, we'd like to support pedagogical approaches that introduce students to programming via school subjects other than computer science, and we feel that the best way to do that, from a technical perspective, at least, is by developing reusable web components for integrating programming activities into other interactive applications and games.

Given the choice of Haskell for the backend implementation, why choose TypeScript for the frontend implementation?

Given that the frontend application and its constituent components are intended to be run in the browser, we didn't feel that Haskell was a good enough browser application language for our needs. We hope that GHC 9.6 and later versions will make it possible to run most of the backend code in the browser (i.e., the type checker, evaluator, and actions engine), which would eliminate the need for a server instance for most Primer programming activities, but it seems very unlikely that we would ever implement the frontend UI in Haskell.

Our initial frontend prototype was written in PureScript, but once we shifted into production application development in the fall of 2021, we felt that we'd be better off switching to TypeScript and, in particular, the React ecosystem. We found that, during the prototype's development, we were reinventing too many basic UI components in PureScript, most of which already had numerous robust implementations in React. (We also felt at the time that, unfortunately, it was too big a risk to the project to try integrating React components into a PureScript frontend application.)