[jarcane]

Whereas after spending even a day with it I found myself wanting to run screaming back to Haskell.

No typeclasses, no monads, more primitive pattern matching, no guards, use of massive nested elseif considered idiomatic ...

Simple tasks wind up feeling tedious because so many of the standard tools and patterns of any other ML language are simple missing completely. The result feels like trying to work with one of those random toy Lisps people make in a weekend and throw up on Github.

It frustrates me, because in theory I do like the concept of the Elm architecture, I love ML-style type systems, and I work with reactive programming every day in ClojureScript. But the language it's attached to is so incomplete that it quickly just becomes a pain.

[noelwelsh]

That's exactly the dividing line I see in those who love Elm and those who don't. People coming from Ruby / JS backgrounds appreciate a modern type system and it isn't so different from languages they are used to that it is hard to get going. People already used to modern functional programming miss the abstractions they are used to that Elm doesn't provide. I find this really interesting. As a community we don't give enough attention to the sociological aspects of programming. You can see similar things in the adoption of languages like Go and Elixir.

[lolive]

(Sorry for my poor english but i need some clarification) Do you put Go, Elixir and Elm is the same bag, i.e langages a step further JS in term of abstraction, i.e langages easy to understand when you come from plain JS? And then, you put Purescript and Haskell in another bag, i.e langages with advanced abstractions absent from "casual" langages, i.e langages requiring a lot of effort to learn? Did I summarize your idea correctly?

[a-saleh]

I think understood the Elm/Haskell/Purescript, i.e:

Javascript dev sees Elm and might think "Wow,a type-system and it is awesome, didn't expect that"

Haskell dev sees Elm and might think "I am missing so many features with these types" and consider something else, probably pure-script, that has similar toolbelt.

Not sure about the rest though.

[noelwelsh]

a-saleh is correct. Regarding Go and Elixir, I think Ruby / Python seem them and think "wow, I can program in a familiar style and I get performance and concurrency!" Haskell etc. people look at them and think "this smells."

[pka]

Look no further! Try Purescript. It's basically Haskell (albeit strictly evaluated) and has everything you listed, plus a record system I really wish Haskell would adopt.

I'm currently using it in production with purescript-thermite, a thin wrapper over React, and it's worked out great.

Elm is great for people coming from JS, but not so much for people coming from Haskell.