Welcome to ElmBridge!

Today, you're going to be learning Elm! So exciting!

This tutorial is meant to be completed over the course of 5 hours, broken up into two chunks:

• 2.5 hours on learning the basics of the language.
• 3 hours building an Elm application from scratch — specifically, an emoji translator!

By the end of this tutorial, you can expect to:

• Know what Elm is, and why people use it.
• Be familiar with the core data structures of the language.
• Understand the architecture of Elm applications.
• Be able to build interactive front-end applications in Elm.

Thanks for coming! Let's get started.

Setup

We're going to be working with:

• The latest version of the Elm language platform.
• The terminal.
• The text editor of your choice.
• The web browser of your choice.

At various points today, you'll also be asked to download code from GitHub, so internet access is also required.

Installing Elm

If you haven't done so already, follow the official Elm guide for installing the language platform. Note for Windows users: You might want to check our handy Windows installation checklist to guide you through installation.

You can verify everything is working by launching the Elm REPL (What is a REPL?) by running the following command in your terminal:

elm repl

If you see the following message, you are ready to go!

---- Elm 0.19.1 ----------------------------------------------------------------
Say :help for help and :exit to exit! More at <https://elm-lang.org/0.19.1/repl>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>

When you're done exploring, you can type :exit to get out.