In our team at Rakuten, we have been using Elm1 in production for almost two years now. This post is about our story, the lessons we learned, and our

Elm at Rakuten | Rakuten Engineering Blog

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2021-08-18 15:30:09

In our team at Rakuten, we have been using Elm1 in production for almost two years now. This post is about our story, the lessons we learned, and our likes and dislikes.

Everything started in the Berlin branch of Rakuten during the summer of 2017. We were maintaining a medium-size single-page application written in Vanilla JavaScript when things started going out of control.

Fixing something in one place would break the code in several other locations. We had global variables everywhere, and debugging was a nightmare.

We decided to impose some discipline and start rewriting functions in a pure style2 to regain some control over our application. The code was getting better, more self-contained, and simpler to understand.

We were thinking: “if we only could find a tool to enforce these rules so we wouldn’t have to rely on our self-discipline…” and then we came across the post “Introduction to The Elm Architecture and How to Build our First Application”3 published in the website css-tricks.com. It was love at first sight.

Moreover, The Elm Architecture, included in the Elm language, seemed an excellent way to structure an application. It ended up being one of the most influential Elm ideas in the front-end world, more about this later.