[masklinn]

> Yes, things could be better, and I'm sure they eventually will be.

That's unlikely, it is not the direction Evan wants to take, and so far the language has gone the opposite direction on purpose and by design.

> And hey, when these kinds of abstractions do arrive

Which they probably won't. Realise that the Elm platform is written in Haskell, Evan knows about these features, he could have used them and he very specifically avoided doing so. If you want these abstraction-building tools you'll be much better off looking at e.g. PureScript rather than wait for Elm to add them.

[ccapndave]

I disagree - I think that firstly Evan wants to implement the right abstraction (which he doesn't think is traditional Haskell type classes), and secondly its simply not a priority.