I’ve been using Elm for over five years on personal projects, but it isn’t a replacement for Javascript as a language, just some client side projects and ones where its async ffi is sufficient.

I think you are falling into a trap of thinking there is a “best” in engineering when that’s basically never the case. Ask experienced developers why they prefer Javascript if you want to get a more nuanced view. I almost always reach for Javascript first, especially for server applications.

I am an experienced developer.

* * *

I can see why you have come to that opinion, but I would actually put myself immediately into tribe 3.

My code is not poetry; it kinda sucks. I’m not a gifted programmer, which is why I make up for my shortcomings with better tools. I use Haskell entirely for the sake of pragmatism [and have in fact bet my businesses on it]. My experience is such that I can build something that just works much more quickly and reliably in Haskell or Elm than I ever could in PHP or Ruby or JavaScript or Clojure[Script]. And I wrote each of these professionally for years.

That's all and good, but you said you can't believe other people could prefer certain languages. I'm saying that you can simply find them and ask them. And not beginners but veteran engineers.

In other words, there's a simple way to disabuse yourself of your position in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34257196 -- just ask experienced engineers why they prefer languages that you consider to be irreparable.