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Comment by jmtucu | Hacker News Reader

I used elm in my company for more than two years and is not designed for enterprise apps, is great for tiny apps or POC but I, and my entire team, don't recommend this language.

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I almost feel the opposite. Even typescript can't stop you from breaking a huge app. With elm it's virtually impossible. I feel much safer in making changes in a big enterprise elm app than a similar js/ts app.

Biggest problem in enterprise context is you need a team that's on board on learning elm. If someone just needs to stop by and make some small changes, it's a bigger hurdle than doing it in a language "everyone" knows.

What makes Elm appealing to me is that is allows me to completely avoid the whole JavaScript ecosystem. There’s no dealing with npm, webpack and all the rest of that confusing mess.

Sure that's great. But the real advantage is ending up with a repo full of pure-FP code that you can improve/refactor with confidence, right?

Strict compilers make sure my repo only contains code over a certain level of quality. Elm is strict. Code produced in Elm is usually of stellar quality, even by beginners; and if not it's very easy to shape it up later on.

Absolutely, I’m just starting out with Elm and wanting to avoid the JavaScript tooling made Elm stand out. The code quality and helpful compiler is what makes me want to continue to use Elm.

I use Clojurescript for the same reason. I will take any opportunity to stay away from the JS ecosystem.

I see it the other way around: I was unable to avoid Javascript, and Elm made it orders of magnitude harder to do that. But I was a n00b working on a side project, so caveat lector!

I wonder if jmtucu meant that elm was hard to teach in an enterprise setting or if you hit wall when your model/codebase reach a certain size.

Both, learning curve was difficult and is impossible to get resources with good/real Elm experience. Also, you end up with a huge Main file in enterprise apps.

Thanks for the details. What stack/lang are the main one used at your company ?

And do you think understanding Elm requires advanced skills / more than senior level ?

Elm use a different paradigm (Functional Programming) and if you are not aware or have experience with it, it will take long time to understand it. The company later moved to React/TS due the issues mentioned above.

Elm is a small and easy language. Certainly much smaller and easier to learn than JavaScript. You should go through the Elm tutorial. It shouldn’t take you long.

I’m on a team with hundreds sharing the same code base is TS.

Few things would make me happier than going back in time and picking a much stricter type system like Elm’s or rescript.

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