insight 
Introduction
This is a blog series about functional programming with Elm. Setting up an development environment with Elm and electron should not be to difficult, but was it?
Why start programming with Elm?
I’m a Software Engineer for a long time and have been programming in an Object Oriented way my whole career, mostly in Java. I like discovering new things and for a time that was mostly Java related. But while there was a lot of development around Java (not much in the language itself), it felt like more of the same. A new library here and there but mostly on known concepts. When I learned to program for the frontend, a whole new world opened. It felt like Java in the early days. Lots of frameworks and libraries popping up, great.
Functional programming
Lots of these new frameworks and libraries were about functional programming. Even Java received functional programming features. They were easy to use, albeit in a different way. It peaked my interest, what is that, real functional programming? By the way it is not a new concept. it exists for a long time, but somehow it is popping up everywhere. So I wanted to do functional programming. But where and in what language? I could go for the backend (there are multiple candidates, like frege and eta), but I choose the frontend, because I needed a more stable framework/language.
What is Elm?
Elm is a functional programming language for frontend. Or as they say on the website, ‘A delightful language for reliable webapps.’ The most important features are ‘No runtime exceptions’, ‘Great performance’, ‘Enforced semantic versioning’, ‘Small assets’, and ‘Javascript interop’. It compiles to Javascript.
The conclusion
I am glad that in the end I got it working with Elm 0.19 and electron. The guide helped me a lot to understand all the moving parts. In the next parts we can start building an application.