4 ms·

A fair but common criticism of new languages. Clojure is famous for this problem as well.

• masklinn 11y ago
  Elm, however, goes the exact opposite and tries to make compiler error messages as helpful as possible to beginners, especially from 0.16 onwards: http://elm-lang.org/blog/compilers-as-assistants http://elm-lang.org/blog/compilers-as-assistants with a whole repository dedicated to non-compiling programs with less than ideal error messages: https://github.com/elm-lang/error-message-catalog/ https://github.com/elm-lang/error-message-catalog/ TBF might be simpler for Elm as it eschews much in the way of type abstractions.
  • bjz_ 11y ago
    Yeah, Elm has a far simpler type system at the moment (no ad-hoc polymorphism for example), so it cuts down on the difficulty of experimenting with new ways of displaying errors. Which I think is a good thing to do, especially seeing as one of the goals of Elm is to make static type systems more 'friendly' to a wider audience. But it is definitely going to push the developers of more complex languages to improve their developer experience - we in the Rust world are certainly taking note!
  • StavrosK 11y ago
    Oh wow, those error messages alone make me want to try Elm. It looks like I could learn the language just from the compiler output.