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Comment by yakshaving_jgt | Hacker News Reader

> But you will still hit regular road-blocks which learning it because of how alien some of its paradigms are when coming from Javascript.

I always found this to be a weird take. Elm is "Maybe Not As Good" because the average JavaScript developer isn't immediately familiar with it?

Maybe we should just be less averse to learning new things, and I don't think simple syntax swaps really count as new things.

Unrelated: your ToC doesn't work.

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I didn't mean that only Javascript developers would be lost, more that Elm kind of "does its own thing" and as such some of its errors or mechanics can be a bit cryptic and require some more experience with the language.

It's not a language you can pick up and go as easily as Javascript is more what I meant, in my opinion at least unless, you're already familiar with pure and strictly typed languages.

I don't think Elm does its own thing. The ideas used in Elm are more "discovered" than "invented" (at least relative to JavaScript), if you're familiar with that line of thinking.

I also don't think its errors are cryptic. Elm's error messages are best in class.

> It's not a language you can pick up and go as easily as Javascript

I don't agree with this either. After having taught people Elm, and also JavaScript as a first language, I don't think mutability is more intuitive to a beginner.

Thanks for pointing out, will look at the ToC asap.

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