"Before this release, my primary priority was: prove that FRP is viable and good. If FRP is not the right way, it does not matter how good or bad the type checker is."<p>This is a lousy justification. If the intent was to prove that FRP was viable and good, why not do it in a dynamic type system? Implementing an extended Hindley Milner inference algorithm can be subtle, so why bother? I can manage a slow type checker, because "eh it's not 1.0", but an unsound type system, no.<p>I've tried Elm because I really wanted to program functionally a small webapp, but the type checker had so many holes in it that I had to translate the algorithms in Haskell, type them and fix them there before porting them back. I'm now really reluctant to try any new version of Elm.
Elm looks really interesting but one thing I haven't been able to figure out from their website is if there is much support for basic CRUD applications. I know they have basic HTML input controls and web service support but that doesn't much compare to modern javascript frameworks. Is Elm more targetted more at game developers?
I really like Elm as a language, although I'm not into web development. Its record syntax is just so wonderful to work with and something Haskell could learn from.
The change from em to pixels seems misguided. Pixels are not a replacement for ems just because it is a programming language. The claim made in the discussion that em is a kludge to make relative resizing possible is wrong. You don't control the users font size to start with. Using ems lets me specify sizes in terms relative to your font size <i>which I do not know</i>. Without ems, I have to force a pixel size on everything to start with, which is terrible (people with vision problems can't read anything now) and which doesn't actually work (setting a font to 10px will not work in my browser for example, I have the minimum font size constrained to 14px). We really do need both px and em to be available.<p>On a side note, any plans to integrate sounds? The use case I have that got me considering elm was simple web based games like solitaire or connect 4. Sound effects would be really nice there.