[ccapndave]

Its true that you can't currently write a service worker in Elm. However, in practice for any decent size app you are going to end up with a mix of Elm and Javascript with communication happening through ports. Therefore you can write the service worker in JS and then talk to it from Elm.

Of course it would be nicer to be able to write everything in Elm, but I find having the majority of your app in Elm with a bit of JS is significantly nicer than having the whole app in JS.

You can make it nicer still by using Typescript instead of Javascript, and defining interfaces for the data going through the ports, giving you type safety across the whole stack.

I'm using this approach right now in a mobile Elm/Typescript app with great success.

[softawre]

I'm a huge TypeScript fan.

Yet I worry about adding Elm to new projects, mostly because it raises the level of developer I need to hire to maintain it. I'm not in SV or in a tech hotspot at all, so maybe I have to think about this more than the average HN reader.

[tikhonj]

I just helped a relatively junior developer—sharp but with no real functional programming experience—get started with Elm for a small internal tool. He got something up and running almost entirely. I think I spent around ~1.5 hours helping him get things set up and understand the basics.

Personally, I'm actually not the biggest fan of the design philosophy behind Elm, but I do have to admit it's easy to learn with some great introductory learning materials. Getting somebody motivated up to speed on maintaining Elm is not an issue.

For what it's worth, I think the same is true of Haskell-style languages in general: with a bit of guidance, it's not hard to make new programmers productive. That's the experience IMVU[1] had when switching several internal projects to Haskell from PHP, if you want a case study. I met the lead engineer who wrote that post once and he explained that it actually took about as long to train an incoming developer (with no FP experience) in Haskell as it did to train incoming PHP developers on IMVU's in-house PHP "flavor" (frameworks, code organization... etc).

Picking up Haskell or Elm is a bit difficult by yourself for a few reasons: there's no clear path on what to learn, the learning materials are a bit hit-or-miss and there's a lot of incidental complexity. However, if you provide a bit of guidance (ie curate libraries) and help overcome some of the incidental complexity (ie install the compiler and tools) it's surprisingly accessible.

[1]: https://engineering.imvu.com/2014/03/24/what-its-like-to-use... (see "Training" section especially)

[ccapndave]

If you don't mind using remote developers, then your location doesn't have to matter. It's true that it might be a bit harder to find a developer (although Elm is getting more popular day by day), but the other side of the coin is that your application is likely to have less bugs and need less maintenance. My experience is that Elm takes a bit longer to write than JS/TS, but once written it tends to work correctly the first time.