When comparing Assembly vs Elm, the Slant community recommends Elm for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?” Elm is ranked 13th while Assembly is ranked 49th. The most important reason people chose Elm is:
Lack of run-time exceptions makes it easy to produce large swathes of reliable front-end code without drowning in tests.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Low Level - it's how the computer works
One of the best ways to learn how a computer actually works is to work your way up from lower level abstractions. Assembly, being only a level above machine code, is low enough level to make it clear how the computer is actually performing a computation, including code flow and loops, but high enough level to not be excessively tedious for the type of small projects that a student would do at the beginning of their first programming class. Use of an assembler with macros can stretch this even a bit further.
Pro Naturally creates fast and small programs
Because of its natural syntax and low-level nature, assembly language programs are typically really small and fast.
Unlike other programming languages, in assembly language it is really hard to create a slow and over-bloated program.
Pro You must look into it if you really want to understand what computers do
There is no other way to understand a processor, so dig in.
Pro Useful for embedded systems
A curriculum that involves an embedded component, such as an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi, can encourage students by allowing them to immediately connect their work with 'real systems'. Assembly is the ideal language for getting started with and understanding these devices, and since Assembly can be called from C, the code will still be useful if students move on to C later in the program.
Pro Uniform syntax
Assembly language syntax is relatively uniform, and so there's less room for a student to get confused by obscure characters, or miss some meaning implied by structure, such as with scoping rules, or call-by-name/value/reference semantics. While there may be a lot of mnemonics to look up, most work involves only a very small subset of them.
Pro No run-time exceptions
Lack of run-time exceptions makes it easy to produce large swathes of reliable front-end code without drowning in tests.
Pro Inferred static typing
ML static typing is great because it's always there, you just choose how explicit you want to be and how much you want the compiler to do.
Pro Super easy refactoring with very helpful compiler errors
In no other language you can refactor so easy without any worries, since the compiler will guide you through. It is like TDD but than compiler-error driven.
Pro Designed around high-level front-end development
As Elm was designed as a front-end langauge, it has out of the box support for things like DOM-element creation, letting programmers focus on their application logic, rather than implementation details specific to the web.
Pro Great and simple way to learn Purely Functional Programming
You can try to apply some functional programming ideas in other languages that have an imperative basis, but you haven't seen the real power unless you tried it in the environment of purely functional programming. Elm is a simple language with great learning resources and easy graphical output, which makes it easy to explore the power of functional programming. Plus programming in Elm is very readable.
Pro Good tooling
All major editors have great support. With Atom for example, Elm plugins are available for linting, formatting, make/compiler support and Elmjutsu will simply overflow you with super useful functions, like navigate to referenced definition and show expression type.
Pro Batteries included
The Elm Architecture means you don't need to spend valuable time and effort choosing the right frameworks, state management libraries, or build tooling. It's all built in.
Pro Static module system
Elm uses easy to use modules.
Use:
import List
import List as L
import List exposing (..)
import List exposing ( map, foldl )
import Maybe exposing ( Maybe )
import Maybe exposing ( Maybe(..) )
import Maybe exposing ( Maybe(Just) )
Creation:
module MyModule exposing (foo, bar)
Pro Missing syntactic sugar
Easy to learn, most functions have only one way, not 5 alternatives where you must study where to best use what.
Pro Growing community
Pro Interactive Programming and Hot Swapping
Support for hot swapping and interactive programming is included.
Pro Easy to code review
The lack of side-effects and simple, consistent language semantics make it easy to quickly review incoming changes.
Pro Higher confidence in code correctness and quality
Pure functions, immutable data structures, amazing compiler, clean and homologous syntax used for HTML, logic, and optionally to replace CSS, elimination of entire classes of bugs so you don't even need most unit tests. These factors lead to better code, better programs, higher confidence, and ultimately, more satisfaction.
Pro Not quite Haskell semantics
Luckily you do not have to learn Haskell to be able to do any Elm. It is meant to be a language that compiles to Javascript, so for Javascript programmers (Front end) not for CS students who want to learn as many different algorithms as possible.
Cons
Con Difficult learning curve
Starting off as a beginner with assembly language could prove very daunting. I suggest learning a high level language first (e.g. C) to get a good grasp of programming - especially dealing with bits, bytes, numbers, accessing memory with pointers (which is why I suggest C).
Then once that person is comfortable writing C (or whatever high level language) programs, they would find moving to assembler a little less of a "What the hell?!!!" experience.
Con Rarely a requirement or used in professional employment
(except for experts, which will outperform you in assembly language and execution speed on any day of the week, simply because they have full control of the processor.)
Con Not very portable
The instruction set may change depending on what CPU architecture is being used. Also, there will be some differences in implementations due to different assemblers being used, such as with changes in OS.
Con Language for those sadists that like pain
Not recommended as a first language. However, in small doses to show how higher level code is executed, can be of some value. Is also a language that will take a longer time to learn or finish projects with, so usually not for those who are in a hurry to get anything in particular done.
Con Hyperspecific syntax isn't a good first step to learning other modern languages
Con Lack of typeclasses
Elm doesn't have typeclasses which means some code needs to be duplicated. A fix in a function that needs typeclasses means all of the duplicates need to be fixed too.
Con limited js interop
only one way ports are available as a crude js FFI. This means you can only call functions both directions but will not get a result.
Con Harder to get buy-in from devs and mgmt
It's a total divergence from what most people are used to in the JS ecosystem. The change in syntax can be scary, the change in approaching problems can be scary. The fact that it's not backed by FANG can be scary. The fact that it's not v1.0 can be scary. The governance model and the deliberately slow release cadence can be scary. There are a couple harsh medium articles, hackernews/reddit posts out there made by people with an ax to grind that can be scary if you don't have a better picture of the Elm community, the tradeoffs that have been made, or the benefits to be had over other options. None of these are good reasons to write off further investigation of a great tech, but it happens.
Con Code Repetition
Because of the lack of genericness Elm needs a lot of code to be repeated. There are 130+ implementations of map in elms core libraries.
Con Features get removed without warning
Often features that are deemed to be misused by the community like infix operators get removed without much of a warning.
Con Community harsh if criticised
If one even dares to start a discussion about a feature on elms slack, discord, subreddit or github one will be aggressively shut down often argueing that one should use purescript instead
Con Poor Windows support
Few if any of Elm's core contributors are Windows users and breaking bugs are sometimes left for weeks or months.
Con Good for beginners not good for experts
Development in elm is quite nice until you need some more advanced features. These however are actively discontinued and removed because elm wants to establish a "single way of doing things" philosophy
Con Updates break existing code often
The last few updates of elm broke existing code in major ways.
Con Adds an additional layer of abstraction
Some users claim that Elm adds an additional layer of abstraction, meaning that it is one more hurdle between the brain and the product.
Con Functional programming itself has quite a steep learning curve
Functional programming can be quite difficult to get your head around. It takes time to unlearn object orientational habits.
Con No Genericness in the future
Currently there is no code genericness like typeclasses possible, it has been officially stated that this will never change.
Con Not database-friendly
It is lots of work to make a server or database your "one source of truth", as Elm makes you write endless JSON parse boilerplate to talk to the server.
Con No Syntactic Sugar
Often you need to write longer and less readable code because there are no alternatives that are more concise.