[aeturnum]

I've also got a little side project in Elm and, like a lot of folks here, the experience has been very mixed. On one hand, when Elm is happy, it does just work. It's fast and relatively svelte and generally great. Its errors are clear and easy to understand, though not always easy to solve.

The downsides of Elm are that the language really does have different expectations than less purely functional lambda-calculus inspired languages. I found dealing with my projects' Msg types, in particular, to be a pain. Once you understand the Elm way of thinking about things it does make sense.

My sense of the community is that they are extremely helpful about showing you the "elm-ish" solution to your problem. They can be pretty obtuse about *why* that is the way to do it. In general, I thought the transition from imperative OO langauges like JS to the lisp-ish Elm was a lot harder than it needed to be. I would ask why my approach wasn't working and get a reply telling me to do it a different way - which didn't really help me understand why my approach didn't work. I can understand why it would be exhausting to try to meet people where they are, but I also get why the "do it this way" approach is off-putting.