Hacker News Reader

You can say that.

But, I also tried to learn and use OCaml and Haskell in actual projects. They are nowhere near as friendly and approachable as Elm to beginners.

View on HN

Well comparing Elm to OCaml or Haskell does not make too much sense. OCaml is a 20 years old multi-paradigm, general purpose language that is extremely useful for so many things (writing compilers for example) while Elm is a domain-specific programming language to be used in the browser. Apples and oranges.

I didn't compare them in that sense. I only compared how easy it is to get started with. They share some concepts, like being functional languages and having good type systems.

Elm definitely helped me understand many concepts in OCaml and Haskell. But to go beyond that, it's difficult.

Elm is definitely in my future - in fact, many of the ML based languages are as well: Purescript, Haskell, F#, ReasonML, etc. Elm will be and is the gateway to all of that because it gives you only 1 path to traverse and tries to set up all the initial sign posts along the way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com