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Many developers who try out programming in a functional programming language describe it as an “a-ha” moment and begin to look for and make opportunities to use functional languages. However, CTOs and other technical leaders often approach these languages with trepidation or dismissal. Are the benefits of functional languages truly worth the investment in increased training and costlier hiring?

Elm is a functional programming language, with a focus on the front-end of web applications. It is famous for providing a delightful developer experience, while also providing many useful constraints which allow tooling to optimize it in a variety of ways. These constraints which the language imposes are viewed as either impractical roadblocks or incredible multipliers, depending on the viewpoint of the team involved.

On the heels of a recent string of supply chain security incidents in the JavaScript ecosystem, I thought it might be timely to look at security within the ecosystem of the Elm programming language.

The Elm programming language is “a delightful language for reliable web applications.” It would be used as an alternative to React, Vue, Svelte, Angular, and other web application frameworks. Elm is an opinionated, niche language and framework that is not for everyone, but those who use it often find it a defining experience that forever changes how they approach building applications.

At Engage, we've been excited to embrace a new technology for creating web applications that are more maintainable, performant, and reliable. Elm is a programming language that compiles to JavaScript, designed from the ground up for creating web applications, in a way that guides developers towards well-architected code, which we've been excited to explore and have now officially decided to adopt as our primary front-end development language.

I've written about the high level benefits of using the Elm language, this post deals with the developer experience of using Elm.