Our Use of Haskell and Elm

What I liked about this article is that rather than being a complete sales pitch it mentions the cons about adopting a language that is not used at mass scale. The biggest one being the ability to find and hire talent. They get around this challenge by being willing to train, which is reasonable. And refreshing to not see that real challenge swept under the carpet.

There are more and more jobs coming up, some remote and some not.

A lot of them get posted on https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/, which is fairly active, worth keeping an eye on it.

Learning ELM really helped me learn Haskell which is something I'm continuing to do, but Elm helped a lot. So I can see why a Haskell shop would want to use Elm for their frontend work. This makes total sense.

That said, my initial enthusiasm for using Elm, aside from a gateway-drug to Haskell, has waned. I just do not have enough confidence in adopting Elm for our internal project nor to recommend it to other companies.

The last release of Elm was 1 year and 8 months ago. The new release is purported to break many things. However, this new release is unknown, it's really unknown when it's going to be released and aside from a few insiders and contributors no one else seem to know what to expect.

Elm applies some interesting principles (type safety, purity, etc.) that helps to reason about your code. But, it's direction is driven by one person. That in itself is not bad, however, there is very little communication coming out of him (the last blog update by him was 1.5 years ago). Because of that, I started looking at Reason and what FB and others are doing.

I think it makes no sense to invest months or years into something like Elm at this point and any advantages Elm might have had initially, is coming to parity with other solutions.

I still think if you want to get your hands dirty with functional programming, play around with Elm. The Pragmatic Studio Elm lesson is great starting point. But look elsewhere for any serious projects.

Why is the pace of releases an important metric for using a programming language?

Focus on code quality, and maintenance simplicity.

If anything, being able to use the same version for x years and having it be consistently better than any JS library/framework I used, means that the work done is of high quality.

Maybe you should watch Evan's talks from various Elm conferences ( search on youtube, for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGlzRt-FYto ) He addresses that concern that some people have, and why it has the pace it has.

As I understand it, it's better to do things right and take as long as it needs, rather than hurry and ship fancy things just to ship them.

Elm is perfectly production ready as is, and beats any JS stack for me. Both in code quality and maintenance cost.