Probably, one of my biggest career mistakes was opting for a little known PHP cms instead of WP as I thought it would be easier for the stakeholders to work with the limited options.
Since then, I've always avoided going away from the mainstream toolset.
Yes, however:
- Elm has a very small surface area (you can read through the guide [0] in a weekend)
- There are many folks who love functional programming && are willing to learn Elm
So, given those two facts, the lack of Elm developers compared to other "markets" is not a big issue.
For me, personally, the only risk with Elm is its incredibly opaque development. It's led by Elm's BDFL and a few other folks and it's almost as though they go out of their way to make Elm hard to adopt for outsiders.
For example, all you have to do is change elm's version to 1.0.0 to signal to outsiders that, yes .. Elm is and has been production ready for quite a while now (years?). Instead "insiders" will reason and rant about how 0.19.1 is fine.
----
That said, I know very little about Elm and would love to understand more about what it offers that's so exciting. I skim-read the article, will read in more detail later.
In the end, we hire interesting, curious devs, and ask them to use tooling (elm) that has a pretty shallow learning curve.
I think bootstrapping a project in Elm without any experience on the team could be tough, but once you have some expertise, the seeds you plant in yield abundant fruit. At NoRedInk it's been a great success -- especially with regards to "finding other developers".