Stream: beginners

Topic: Elm-to-Roc journey

cmart (Dec 21 2022 at 20:25):

Hello punk Roc-ers.

I use a lot of Elm, curious about Roc, and learned barely enough to start Advent of Code.

Many aspects of Roc are identical to Elm, which makes the aspects that are different a surprise. Example surprises:

• Pipeline operator passes the LHS result as the first argument (instead of last argument) to the RHS function
• No partial application / currying, you need to write an in-line function

Has anyone else started their Roc journey already enlightened and/or ruined by Elm? Are there any resources to flatten that learning curve and help understand any differences in philosophy?

I'd love to see (perhaps even write) a "Differences between Roc and Elm" guide, though maybe the audience would be too niche, and Roc is still too much of a moving target for that to be worth writing now?

(I also respect that Roc is a different language with different creators, goals, and compile targets, so please don't interpret this as complaining!)

Brian Carroll (Dec 21 2022 at 20:28):

https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/blob/main/roc-for-elm-programmers.md

Tanner Nielsen (Dec 21 2022 at 20:29):

Beat me to it :smile:

cmart (Dec 21 2022 at 20:30):

right there in the repo root too :laughing:

Brian Carroll (Dec 21 2022 at 20:30):

Definitely not too niche around here! Roc was inspired by Elm! Welcome!

Last updated: Jul 26 2025 at 12:14 UTC