elmx

You interpreted hackability = ability for you to spend your time hacking on it. But I think they were going for hackability = other people will be more likely to develop plugins. The lower barrier to entry is basically one of the major upsides of Atom/VSCode: their plugins tend to have cutting edge support. For example, iirc Atom was the first to have a good plugin for Elm lang (elm-jitsu). Meanwhile the Elm plugin for Jetbrains' IntelliJ came later as the result of the effort of two Microsoft employees spending billable time on the somewhat academic project. A better example is that the creator of elmx ("JSX for Elm") was able to create an Atom plugin for their basically experimental library: https://github.com/pzavolinsky/elmx#atom-integration I also think this differs from "hackability" when used with Vim/Emacs which does mean "you wil

As I alluded to I think the HTML version is less weird because it is close to what you're going to see when you open your browser DevTools. So the JSX/HTML style requires less mental gymnastics overall. Also there are some things about Elm's DOM style in particular that are especially awkward, compared to other function-style dom creation syntax [0], like the [ ] everywhere. > The main difference is that the Elm "bracket soup" is just a composition of functions So is the JSX counterexample I gave, (it de-sugars to function calls), which is why elmx [1] can exist, and seems like an improvement to me. [0] https://github.com/hyperhype/hyperscript [1] https://github.com/pzavolinsky/elmx

Elm definitely tries painfully hard to be different, which is only exacerbated by its one-true-way attitude. Regarding HTML, you may want to look at elmx [0]. It accomplishes exactly what you described. [0] https://github.com/pzavolinsky/elmx

For Elm, there's elmx https://github.com/pzavolinsky/elmx

JSX-like precompiler for Elm: https://github.com/pzavolinsky/elmx