[tmountain]

They're really similar. Elm works hard to abstract away the JavaScript universe and create really clearly defined borders regarding being inisde Elm land or outside of Elm land. Specifically, interacting with external libs, etc. involves retrofitting them to work via a port, which lets side effecty stuff come in as a standard message without having to deviate from the basic design. Redux may do something similar (I forget), but the gist of what I'm saying is that Elm works really hard to adhere to its core primitives to limit cognitive overhead for most tasks.