Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks

Chapter 3Elm

by Bruce Tate

Every day, we programmers make easy things hard. Many of us have coded business applications in C++ and Java, barely pausing to believe that there might be a better language for the job. I’m reminded of the sheep dogs in Babe—my daughter’s favorite movie—that frightened sheep into their pens with amazing acrobatics until Babe came along and just talked them in.

JavaScript has been an enigma in the browser. In some ways, it has given us more than we expected. The embattled language provides behavior far beyond HTML markup, and it is just about universally deployable. But in the end, JavaScript is still just JavaScript. There’s no module system; it suffers from weak typing; it is conflicted and inconsistent. You probably ...