Elm Town Elm Town 84 – Wonder: Elm all the way down with Justin Lubin
Jun 3, 2025
Justin Lubin, a PhD student at UC Berkeley, discusses his research journey in programming languages and human-computer interaction. He shares insights on his work with Sketch-n-Sketch, exploring how statically-typed functional programmers code. The conversation highlights the challenges of adapting to Elm, the potential of graphical programming, and the emotional hurdles faced by beginners. Additionally, Justin addresses the need for programming tools that cater to biologists, and offers thought-provoking book recommendations that inspire innovative thinking.
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Output-Directed Programming Insight
- Sketch-n-Sketch focuses on output-directed programming via graphical edits rather than textual code manipulation.
- This differs from structure editors like Hazel which emphasize meaning preservation during in-progress textual editing.
Learning Elm on a Large Codebase
- Justin started working with Elm by reading the official Elm book for onboarding despite having no prior Elm experience.
- He credits good mentorship and Elm’s approachable syntax for easing entry into a large Elm codebase.
Ideomatic Code From Graphical Edits
- Sketch-n-Sketch aims to generate idiomatic and minimal edits to code from graphical changes, avoiding messy code generation typical in visual tools.
- This surgical approach contrasts with traditional visual editors that regenerate less readable code.
