The core of his point seems to be that Elm almost provides you with a strong type-safe way of building a select box. But it stops short by not allowing you to e

The core of his point seems to be that Elm almost provides you with a strong type-safe way of building a select box. But it stops short by not allowing you to enumerate the values in your type definitions. Since you can't do this, you have to create a regular list with those values in it, which both breaks DRY principles and prevents the compiler from fully validating your code (which is basically the whole point of Elm). Now, all that being said, i'm not familiar enough with Elm to know if he's actually right or if there is a better way to do what he wants. But that is what I think the crux of his point is.