Keith Lazuka and AJ Alt from Microsoft share their experience writing the amazing Elm language support package for the IntelliJ family of integrated development environments.

Thank you to our sponsors, Ellie, Culture Amp and Joel Clermont.

Special thanks to Xavier Ho (@Xavier_Ho) for editing and production of this episode!

Recording date: 23 February 2019

Guests

• Keith Lazuka (@klazuka)
• AJ Alt (@ajalt on Medium)

Show Notes

00:00:00 Introduction

00:01:37 Guest intro

• intellij-elm
• elm-hot

00:02:45 Project beginnings

00:07:10 About IntelliJ

00:08:04 Elm at Microsoft

00:09:20 Writing IntelliJ plugins with Kotlin

00:13:34 Parsing Elm to produce an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST)

00:16:22 So many features!

00:18:56 Type inference

00:19:55 How do you decide what features to build?

00:20:44 Tidying up dead code and imports since Elm 0.19

00:23:03 Supporting both Elm 0.18 and Elm 0.19

00:27:25 Parsing partial Elm programs with errors

00:30:38 Language servers and multi-editor support

00:32:57 Saving on scrolling

00:34:28 Effortless refactoring

00:36:19 Extensible records

00:37:43 Test-driven development & BNF grammar

00:38:39 How do you split work?

00:40:42 Outro