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> I'm a beginner with functional languages, but isn't the type system completely orthogonal to the fact that Elm is a functional language?

You're completely correct, though for whatever reason functional languages almost always have strong type systems.

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With the huge exception being Lisp-based languages (closure, scheme, etc....). Heck, Lisp was the first functional language and first one that made full use of dynamic typing.

There is also Erlang and Elixir which while functional aren't typed. There are some static analysis tools though.

I'm just getting into Elixir now but even without it being statically typed, it does catch a ton of errors and present warnings at compile time.

It's remarkably useful so far. I feel like I have an extra level of protection compared to Ruby or Python.

Erlang is dynamically typed. It's certainly not untyped - it's assembly and Forth that are untyped.

Dynamic typing (like static typing) is a spectrum, actually. You can flag method missing errors at a minimum, but in a nominally dynamically typed system, you could flag class mismatches before you ever got to a dispatch error.

Sure, I didn't say it wasn't.

My point was that 'untyped' should not be conflated with 'dynamically typed'. They're worlds apart.

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