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I started with Elm, then I started working through Learn You a Haskell. At first I thought the lack of typeclasses in Elm was a big missing piece, but now I see the potential for me to turn a programming problem into a little-too-philosophical debate about the nature of truth in the universe or some such. In other words leaving out typeclasses may help but not guarantee that I keep my eyes on the screen and off of my navel.

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The hard part with Elm’s lack of typeclasses is the lack of do notation. It’s pretty easy to end up in Elm’s version of “callback hell” where you’re nested several `andThen`s deep. And that’s for a language that doesn’t have `IO`. That said, I would love to try an “Elm on the backend” that specifically lacks features compared to Haskell.

Scala seems quite close. It has a lot of features. But it's flexible enough that it doesn't "hurt" as much as writing production code in Haskell.

The advantage (or potential problem as you see it) is typeclasses encourage thinking about the meaning and behavior of what you are doing.

For simple cases, the end result of no typeclasses can be compelling sometimes.

For larger cases, taking away that useful tool to wrangle inherent complexity usually results in more complexity taking the form of gobs more simple code that obsfucates the task at hand.

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