I don't believe in Elm one bit. it's been 4 years guys. I follow its developement (it's not a hard thing to do after all, it's a snail pace) because its creator is intelligent and there are a few nice things in it.
But as a practical platform to build real apps? No way. I mean you can build apps with any tech, so of course people will try and succeed with it; but it's just a bad choice.
Its creator is a bit on the control freak side and far more of a backend dev than a frontend dev. The reactive framework (the Elm architecture) is full of boilerplate and anything that was not forethought will have to be a metric ton of more boilerplate or delegated to javascript via asynchronous ports (if you have to hide the crap away in JS land because it's impossible to do in elm, somehow it's not elm's problem). The elm community is minuscule and not always great, doesn't embrace new approaches (the ones who do don't stay for long as it's so frustrating) they're more like robots repeating "wait for Evan to tell us how to do that. If Evan didn't say anything yet, you are taking big risks" or "Evan is working on this particular problem, just wait 2 years"
Meanwhile we can build apps real fast with typescript, which in version 2.0.3 is a very capable and more than typesafe enough language.
bucklescript/Reason might be a good alternative to the very closed Elm ecosystem too if like me you like ML.
I think where elm shines is as a simplistic language and sanitized environment to teach people programming. That's about it. It's still in a state of a "research language" (and it's good at it), but is not being marketed as such.
Rejecting a programming language feature because you find it constraining is just ignoring history. Arguments similar to yours have been used to dismiss Garbage Collection, type systems, and even the use of high-level languages, all of which were very successful precisely because they constrain the set of programs you can write.
Also, why all the hate? As you said, neither you or the TypeScript community have any reason to feel threatened by Elm, which nevertheless has had a very positive influence on the mainstream JavaScript community (look at Redux).
The only impact your comment could have is discouraging the Elm community from furthering its valuable research in the field of web development. Please write constructively next time.
There is no hate here. Elm's current objective is to go mainstream. I just say it's not good yet.
I agree with you, Elm is very valuable as a competitor.
what is the feature you're talking about? I don't see any innovation in elm on the order of a GC or a type system. Perhaps you're referring to Elm's "feature" of removing the ability to create abstractions away from the programmer so that everything must be done by copy-paste and brute force.
Depends. I also work with scala.
Yet somehow I don't need monads, functors, applicatives, etc on the frontend. TS with the right strictness flag enabled, is a good, practical middle ground for now even though I hope a good compile-to-js/assembly will be useable soon (I still have yet to try bucklescript/reason for real)
But as a practical platform to build real apps? No way. I mean you can build apps with any tech, so of course people will try and succeed with it; but it's just a bad choice.
Elm is impratical because you can't do anything with it. I loathe directing attitudes in that field where everything moves fast (http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/EnablingAttitude.html).
Its creator is a bit on the control freak side and far more of a backend dev than a frontend dev. The reactive framework (the Elm architecture) is full of boilerplate and anything that was not forethought will have to be a metric ton of more boilerplate or delegated to javascript via asynchronous ports (if you have to hide the crap away in JS land because it's impossible to do in elm, somehow it's not elm's problem). The elm community is minuscule and not always great, doesn't embrace new approaches (the ones who do don't stay for long as it's so frustrating) they're more like robots repeating "wait for Evan to tell us how to do that. If Evan didn't say anything yet, you are taking big risks" or "Evan is working on this particular problem, just wait 2 years"
Meanwhile we can build apps real fast with typescript, which in version 2.0.3 is a very capable and more than typesafe enough language.
bucklescript/Reason might be a good alternative to the very closed Elm ecosystem too if like me you like ML.
I think where elm shines is as a simplistic language and sanitized environment to teach people programming. That's about it. It's still in a state of a "research language" (and it's good at it), but is not being marketed as such.