[orange8]

> My whole point is that Elm is (or one day soon will be) much superior to JS et. al. This is a cost/benefit analysis, not tribalism.

I'm sorry, but your enthusiasm for Elm might be blinding your reasoning. JS is an EXTREMELY flexible languange. Open and malleble to both experts and newbies alike. Open to all styles and paradgims of programming including object and functional, which is what makes it possible to be the worlds most compiled to languange (https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/List-of-langu...). Elm comes nowhere close to beating the JS cost benefit analysis.

In the end, the business value always wins out. Elm, started in 2012 is even older than react, and would've took of long ago if it had any business value.

> It's puzzling that more JS programmers don't adopt Elm.

JS developers come from diverse backgrounds (expert, newbie, functional, object, procedural etc). The ones that like elms approach will adopt it, those that don't will use a different style/compiler/transpiler; and it all ends up as JS. That's flexibility at work.

[pdimitar]

> which is what makes it possible to be the worlds most compiled to languange

Okay now that's just ridiculous.

There are no other native scripting languages that the browsers understand. Of course it's going to be the most compiled to language, doh.

Your statement is along the lines of "all Earth life breathes oxygen, this has to mean something".

Well of course it means something. It means that our planet doesn't offer alternative biomes. It doesn't mean that oxygen-based life is ideal (which it isn't).

JS is a legacy everybody is stuck with. That doesn't make it good. It only makes it a safe choice because it's widely used and has a larger pool of programmers as you said.

Most businesses are followers. If an universally better technology makes strides you can be damn sure a lot of those follower businesses will be all over it after Facebook or Google adopts it. Nothing new, businesses always seemed to operate like so.

Not sure what value do your comments bring except for stubbornly reasserting the state of our currently (and highly suboptimal) reality. Practically almost every non-junior programmer knows how we arrived here.

And finally, the better business value of JS [devs] is far from given. It's a local maximum and nothing else. I've seen teams replace 5 average programmers with 1 senior, save 40% expense in doing so, and have much more maintenable code with much less support costs. These things do happen even if they are not the majority. And they will keep happening until one day somebody like you will lecture people how "JS was never bound to succeed".

You should realise you are only reasserting current reality and are doing post-hoc rationalisations in an attempt to understand the said reality. This is completely fine; we all try to make sense of the world. Reality however is always in flux. Keep an eye out. ;)

[carapace]

> your enthusiasm for Elm

As I said, I'm not an Elm fanboy. I don't actually like it that much.

> JS is an EXTREMELY flexible languange. Open and malleble to both experts and newbies alike. Open to all styles and paradgims of programming including object and functional

Sure. So what? So is LISP. I'm talking about "business value", meaning: if you don't care about how shiny and flexible and open your programmers' languages are, you care about the hard $$$ cost of development and maintainence per unit of webapp functionality delivered, then Elm makes a heck of a lot more sense than JS+etc.

The compiler and the fact that you get zero front-end errors just blows away the typical JS dev cycle with a buggy front-end. I can't quantify it because you can't quantify the hypothetical lost business due to hypothetical bugs that don't happen because you're not using JS.

To me it seems clear that it is much cheaper to develop and maintain Elm apps.

> what makes it possible to be the worlds most compiled to languange

Nah. That's because it's the only language in the browser and people would rather use something else.

> Elm, started in 2012 is even older than react, and would've took of long ago if it had any business value.

You're begging the question I think, my whole puzzlement is that the business value seems very clear yet Elm hasn't taken off.

To date, the only serious objection I've heard here and elsewhere is that they removed older docs when they bumped a minor version number. That sucks.

[orange8]

> you care about the hard $$$ cost of development and maintainence per unit of webapp functionality delivered, then Elm makes a heck of a lot more sense than JS+etc.

It doesn't, sorry. JS resources, developers and libraries are atleast x1000 more than Elm. business is about supply and demand, more supply == cheaper cost. That's business 101. That's why there are hardly any Elm jobs advertised if compared to JS. You keep talking about how Elm makes better business sense, but the reality of it is completely different. Maybe all those employees are just making the wrong business decision, right? Wishful fanboy thinking. You are even in denial about liking Elm, which is pretty obvious to anyone reading your comments about it.

> Nah. That's because it's the only language in the browser and people would rather use something else.

Something else like dart, flash, VB, Java... oh wait! They've all been used in the browser before, none passed the test of time. And Elms approach (transpiling to JS, CSS, HTML) is not unique either, e.g. TypeScript and its not exactly shinning against competition in its league either. Once it beats competition there, then maybe it can start taking aim at JS, CSS and HTML.

> You're begging the question I think, my whole puzzlement is that the business value seems very clear yet Elm hasn't taken off.

It seems very clear to you, because you like and have invested in the language so much. A less invested "business person" will have a more objective view of which of the two (JS vs Elm) makes more business sense.

[carapace]

Alright, it's clear that you'd rather be insulting than discuss this rationally. I guess I touched a nerve.

Let this be a lesson to me.

"Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him."

(I don't even use Elm. Sheesh.)