Will ELM become a general purpose language?

[julian ebeli]

Hi All
I've just discovered ELM as part of a general interest in Functional Programming.
I'm a Python programmer and have just recently started to do Python Functionally, I'm a slow learner!
Will ELM ever be something I can replace Python with?
I realize its early days but is it part of the plan for this language or will it be the best way to do SPAs

Also should I be learning Haskell, Erlang, Elixir or other if I want to develop my general purpose Functional Programming skills and stay on an ELM pathway?

Thanks

[Joey Eremondi]

Will ELM ever be something I can replace Python with?

Evan has explicitly said that we won't be compiling to JS forever, and there is a lot of interest in Elm on the server side. So I think we can say that Elm will most likely become a general purpose language.

That said, to my knowledge, nobody is working on a non-JS backend for Elm yet, so this is mostly the eventual future.

Also should I be learning Haskell, Erlang, Elixir or other if I want to develop my general purpose Functional Programming skills and stay on an ELM pathway?

Haskell is NOT a prerequisite for Elm, and unless you're planning on actually using Haskell (perhaps as a backend?), mixing the two might actually be confusing, since they're so similar but not identical.

Learning these languages will help give you a broad view of programming, and will certainly be helpful in the backend. But Elm is very different from them, and if your goal is to stay on an Elm pathway, your best bet is probably to use Elm as much as you can. In particular, you could use Electron to make desktop applications with Elm, if that's what you're interested in.

Good luck!

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[Peter Damoc]

Julian,

I also have a Python background :)

Elm will not replace Python anytime soon as a general purpose language. 
Python has way more libraries and documentation, plus some problems are just easier to solve with an imperative approach. 
That being said, Elm needs not replace Python. 

I see myself still doing small, utility scripts in python and serious work in Elm for years to come. 
Elm has a very solid design so, after it reaches 1.0 I see it start to eat a lot from the jobs of other languages. 
It will get alternative backends and this might open the door for even more applications. 

As for Haskell, Erlang, Elixir... Elm was designed to be friendlier than either of those. 

So, it makes no sense to learn Haskell first if you want to work in Elm and it makes a lot of sense to learn Elm first if you want to end up using Haskell. 

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[Zachary Kessin]

I don't know if Elm should become a general server side language. I mean you have many years of development in the runtimes of Erlang (Beam), OCaml and Haskell as well as others. 

At this point I would say that if you want a strong type system on the server side take a look at Haskell, OCaml or F# 

Zach

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