beginner's pain points issues · contributing

Stream: contributing

Topic: beginner's pain points issues

Eli Dowling (Nov 19 2023 at 22:46):

@Luke Boswell said I should make issues for any missing documentation. So I'm going to try to record anytime I get stuck whilst I learn the roc language and document them here and make issues in github for actionable things.
Here is the first and probably worst:

Document abilities:
https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/issues/6016

Eli Dowling (Nov 19 2023 at 22:48):

Some of these I'll be happy to fix myself when I feel I've fully understood the thing I couldn't understand.

Eli Dowling (Nov 19 2023 at 23:01):

Explain functional purity and its implications better:
Searching for the word "unit" and "void" in the tutorial returns no results. I think this is a significant issue given roc doesn't allow this super fundamental feature of most languages. My first experience running roc code went as follows:

Use Stdout.line to print hello world.
Write this

main=
  Stdout.line "hi"
  Stdout.line "hello"

Spend half an hour reading through examples, docs and stuffing around complying broken stuff to try to figure out the accepted method of running two print statements.

The tutorial should contain a section on purity and one that very specifically explains how you would do the kinds of things you would use void returning functions for normally
Issue:
https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/issues/6017

Luke Boswell (Nov 19 2023 at 23:09):

Great. Thanks for sharing. I had a very similar first experience too.

Richard Feldman (Nov 19 2023 at 23:31):

this is great feedback! I'm going to make some revisions to the tutorial this week, and I'll definitely try to improve that aspect of it

Eli Dowling (Nov 19 2023 at 23:34):

I'm very happy to help! I know how hard it can often be to know what a beginner's experience is once you live and breathe something all the time. So I always make a point of trying to capture that early experience.

Last updated: Jul 26 2025 at 12:14 UTC