I’m learning Elm nowadays and I’ve been really happy that there’s finally a way to get into FP and functional programming languages from a front end person’s background.

In my exploration, mostly through random blog posts and this great Pragmatic Studio course, I’ve found one thing difficult.

These fancy pants ML-like programming languages have way too many un-googleable function names in the standard library!

I’m going to list a few of the unrecognizable ones here and give you my own name for them. Let me know more and I will add them. Bookmark this page if you ever want to be able to find out what one of these wild and crazy characters in your Elm source are really for.

1. The superplus ++ The append operator. Works for Strings, Lists and Text types.
2. The forquals /= The not equals operator.
3. The lefthat <| The backward function application operator.
4. The downflipitandreverseit or the righthat |> The forward function application operator.
5. The leftdubs << The function composition to the left operator. This is not a bitshifting operator.
6. The rightdubs >> The function composition to the right operator. This is not a bitshifting operator.
7. The cons :: The cons operator.
8. The pigsnout (..) docs The import everything from a module syntax.
9. The backticks `andThen` docs The use-as-infix syntax.
10. The silence := The JSON Decoder application operator.

What else do you find ungoogleable in Elm? I hope this helps many others on the same journey to understanding Elm.