Elm: ushering in a new era of web development

#elm #javascript #pythonic

_This article may very well read as yet another critique of Javascript no one asked for, but seeing as Javascript == web dev, I just wanted to put my thoughts out there on why Elm is a herald of great things to come… _

I am partial to languages that adhere to a “pythonic philosophy”. In other words, the community strives toward a standard way of doing things.

Throughout its long tenure, Javascript has become an overwhelming and unwieldy beast. Mastery over the multi-headed chimera requires one to wade through the accumulated clunk and navigate a dense ecosystem. It has become heavily reliant on an infinitely growing list of external tools, libraries and frameworks.

Of course all these points lend to Javascript’s flexibility and range. It is a wholly capable language but at the critical cost of compromise to its clarity of practice. It is very much a personal preference, but if you give me 3 ways of doing something, 2 of those ways are wrong. When multiple patterns exist, they tend to get in each other’s way and lead to incoherence in the codebase.

All of this is to say I am very excited to see the future of web app languages like Elm that are adding much needed modernization and streamlining to frontend development.