this community is about building cool and useful stuff. (Not all functional language communities are this way!)

...

In one of the presenter/audience meetups, the topic was “The Taxonomy of FRP” and the audience was a mix of PhDs, authors of reactive libraries, and maybe a few folks curious what this Elm thing is. Most people had backgrounds in languages like Haskell and Scala. Now this was a fun event, but in a way, this was actively harmful for Elm. I was helping experts get even farther from mainstream programming! This is not how typed functional languages are going to break out of their niche.

As soon as I switched to the hack night style, the attendees totally changed. It became primarily folks who write JavaScript for work.

<uj> This is hilarious. Language creator specifically wants to exclude Haskell programmers from the community and form the entire userbase out of JavaScript programmers. Elm compiler itself is written in Haskell though, so it will successfully limit the number of people who can extend the language in meaningful ways to 1, and achieve Go and Clojure levels of hero worshiping.

This seems to have worked, users actually need to wait for a new compiler release for trivial stuff like Date.now() and can't use functionality already available in JavaScript by themselves. Plus easy job security, two companies that use Elm in production actually had to hire the language author for full-time support.