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Discussion on: I am the author of Elm in Action. Ask Me Anything!

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Richard Feldman

EDIT: here's a blog post from one of our junior engineers about her experiences learning Elm in her first week! tech.noredink.com/post/15779255223...

We have new hires doing it in their first week, and that includes devs for whom this is their first job out of a bootcamp (and no prior programming experience before the bootcamp). We've done this several times now - we do lots of pairing when ramping people up, and it usually takes less than a week for someone to get productive enough to make production contributions on their own.

Take that with a grain of salt, though; we're talking "can literally contribute something useful," not "can hammer out features from scratch with no assistance."

I will say that I remember when we taught new hires React from scratch (back in 2014), and the learning curve for Elm today feels comparable to React + Flux + an immutability library back then. Yes it's a whole different language, but it's a simpler setup overall, and the compiler helps a TON. (That said, obviously in 2017 more new hires know React on day one, and the corpus of learning resources for React is much larger than it is for Elm.)