Why Elm?

Chapter 7. So, Why Elm?

You may think I sound like a broken record, but here are the explicit benefits Elm can provide you:

• No runtime exceptions in practice

• Beautiful compile-time errors

• Enforced semantic versioning for Elm packages

• A refactoring experience that makes you feel invincible because it’s so easy and robust

• Language-wide optimization of external effects, which results in strong performance and best practices built into the language

• A litany of well-designed devoloper tools

Elm provides these benefits as a part of the language and the ecosystem. Most of them are built into every Elm project, so you don’t need to turn them on or track down some specific technique in the documentation. You can get some, but not all, of these benefits in a JavaScript project if you know the right concepts and are willing to work hard. But Elm takes care of these things for you. Because these features are built into the language, the entire Elm ecosystem benefits from them. This means you can have high confidence in third-party Elm code.

The learning curve for Elm is short even though parts of the language may feel foreign. Beginners and experienced web developers alike should have no trouble getting started. This is especially the case if you engage with the community on the Elm Slack channel or the Elm subreddit.

If you want to give Elm a test drive, you can adopt it incrementally alongside existing technologies. You don’t need to make a large commitment to try it out in ...