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# Course Scheduler
This is an Elm-based implementation of Homework 4c for Human Computer Interaction.
Elm is a functional programming language that __compiles to JavaScript__.
## Directory structure
* `src/` contains the Elm source code for the application.
* `Model.elm` contains descriptions of the data structures used
in the project.
* `View.elm` contains the code to actually display the HTML page.
* `Decode.elm` contains code to translate the JSON file given to
us into Elm data structures.
* `scss/` contains the (Sassy) CSS that was used to style the project.
* `dist/` contains the compiled Elm and SCSS code, so that you don't
need to install the Elm compiler or anything of that sort.
## Running
Open `dist/index.html` (run `python`'s web server command in `dist`, other than that, business as usual).
## Info
In Elm, HTML is build using functions in the language I don't write HTML per se, but
rather, call functions that build the correspoding HTML elements. For example,
the following code:
```html
<tr class="hello">
<td>Hello</td>
<td>Hello</td>
</tr>
```
Looks like the following in Elm:
```Elm
tr [ class "hello" ]
[ td [] [ text "Hello" ]
, td p] [ text "Hello" ]
]
```
However, the Elm-based view of writing HTML allows for the full
power of the programming language in this "template" section.
For instance, I can write the following:
```Elm
viewAddedBubble : Bool -> List (Html Msg)
viewAddedBubble b = if b then [ span [ class "bubble", class "color-green" ] [ checkIcon, text "Added!" ] ] else []
```
This defines a function that returns an HTML element (a green "Added!" button)
if a boolean `b` is true, and otherwise returns an empty list (thus, the "added" button is absent).
Thus, the same language is used for actually _rendering_ the page as is used for implementing
its logic.
Elm is __reactive programming in its purest form__: the language is built around the idea of FRP
(functional reactive programming). Elm code consists of three main things:
* The model (the current state of the application, including all its data)
* The view (the HTML that is built from the current model / state)
* The update (when events happen, i.e. a user clicks a button, the update changes the state accordingly,
and the view is updated)