Being a contractor, I change teams and projects all the time. And most of the time when I join a team with an existing project, the devs that started it are pretty opinionated on everything.

So sadly simple vanilla JS is not an option if you want to be a preferable candidate for projects. Most of the teams prefer piling libraries upon libraries cause they think it will make things "convenient" or because it's the new exciting trendy library. Whereas I've seen the opposite in the long-term, they make things more complicated and eventually impossible to maintain/reason with.

I'm not trying to sell Elm to anyone, if you don't like it, don't use it. But to me the advantages are quite obvious and I'd take it over any JS framework/library out there. I just hope I could use it at work as well. There are only a few Elm jobs out there right now.

Elm has had 2 releases since 2015 which had breaking changes. The elm-upgrade[0] tool has automated away a lot of the upgrade progress, and the compiler tells you about all the remaining things that need to change.

Put another way, Elm doesn't actually change very often, and when it does, it is typically a smooth ride. (I've been around for 5 breaking releases, and all but one of them were very easy.)

> If you are integrating elm into any kind of existing application, you will likely need webpack.

If that existing application is already using webpack, then sure, you'll probably keep it. But you don't need it for Elm.

For example, we use Elm at work (on a 150,000 LoC Elm code base) and we actually moved away from Webpack because Elm doesn't need it and we weren't happy with its UX. :)

[0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/elm-upgrade

Easy to develop and maintain, big check.

Widely used so you can hire - it's usually easier to hire Elm developers because there are more people who want to use it than jobs hiring for it. The opposite is true for JS. So...better than check, at least for right now! :)

Here is a CTO giving a talk about his company's experiences with Elm:

"Elm from a business perspective" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvQI1KntMhk

For example:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/elm-discuss/92dXqmB4nJ...

But this is common in niche languages. Most of my background is in Clojure, which has a vastly larger userbase than Elm, but it can still be very difficult to find good developers for it. Many of the professional Clojure developers I know learned the language on the job when they went to work for a company that used it. I wouldn't doubt it is similar with Elm. I saw a presentation once by a CTO of a company that started using Elm in production, and he mentioned that hiring is one of the larger risks to adopting it. But that shouldn't necessarily stop anyone, depends on a company's goals (and spirit).

As a CTO and the author of the OP, I can say with confidence this statement is false. Elm works correctly, is easy to develop in, and is easy to train developers that have experience in other languages to write Elm.