I’m not sure who the intended audience for this post is, but I’ve never known any serious or productive developer who quit learning a language just because they got hung up on a few of the trivial syntax examples in this article.
And on top of that, it's a blog post. Evan gave examples of really helpful error messages.
I don't use elm, as I don't do webdev and I don't agree with Evan's tendancy to minimalism, but I really wish other languages had the "pair programming" aspect of the elm compiler.
In special if you try a NEW lang. Lets say I wanna check elm, I try it a little then BANG! weird errors. I will quit, not matter how cool the lang is.
When learning something new, even if you are experienced (I have used professionally more than 12+ langs now) you "budget" to learn something is low: New syntax? New paradigm? hard to install? Limited tooling? Nothing work? Not stackoverflow explains of that error?
You quit in any step of this chain. I glad ELM designer is smart to fix one of them
BTW: Rust is similar here. It have decent error messages.
Being able to do frontend development that /just works/ when it compiles is fantastic. I have yet to use Elm for anything serious because I mostly do backend work, but if I need to Elm would be my choice. No more 'undefined is not a function' mysteries or trying to figure out what part of the latest Javascript framework is stopping me.
Elm has the basics of what you need to develop frontend applications today, even though I'm sure there is work to be done yet.
Also perhaps a mode where I could instruct the compiler to fix the error itself (like the closing brackets) and continue the compilation as far as it can and then output the "fixed" code. That might be a dangerous feature, but it could also be a fun feature to auto-gen your code without knowing much of the language :-).