These days (well, probably for ever, actually), it seems like any time I try to go and start doing some new personal mini programming project, I end up getting nowhere fast due to really stupid bad broken crappy useless hateful ass backwards ux of everything. Somebody give me a million dollars (US, please) so I can pay some smart people to make a programming language ecosystem that isn't just a minefield of crap hell, please.

math is hard.

computers make it infinitely worse.

i pity the fools.

So far, Elm feels like it is over-hyped. The UX just isn't there in my opinion. A few examples:

• The error messages are supposed to be so great. But they are really just overly verbose. And wrong often enough to drive me nuts e.g. I had a variable name typo, or a misplaced extraneous comma, but the error messages where about completely different things. And sometimes the error message doesn't even say a line number.
• The limitations of the error detection & messaging means that I end up breaking things apart more than I otherwise would, just to be able to get the compiler to tell me the real error.
• The debugging story is supposed to be so great, but I haven't seen a way to e.g. debug a single function interactively from the repl. Debugging utility functions seems to be only doable as part of an overall app being run and debugged?
• elm-format drives me nuts. I really do not like a lot of the aesthetic choices made there.
• As much as I love Haskell, I really do not like whitespace-sensitive syntax since it leaves too many things as ambiguous, which then makes using elm-format a gamble and a wrestling match.
• Seems like several elm editing modes think that format-on-save is enough, but I consider it necessary but hardly sufficient.
• The naming of things sucks now because of the history of change. Which linear-algebra package should I be using? Why did webgl fail to install? etc.
• The unit testing framework (uh, again, which one should I even be using?) elm-test doesn't support a message string per assertion to show when Expect fails, which makes it even more annoying to try to figure out why it failed (cf. the lame debugging story).

i sure wish elm-format were smart enough to format as much as it could from the top of the file, rather than doing nothing at all because something at the end of the file isn't finished yet.

I am a pure functional programming fan. But at the same time, I think loops are not pure evil. It drives me nuts when people go to ridiculous lengths to avoid them.

I think Elm gets error message UX wrong. They claim to have such "friendly" error messages, but heck there's plenty of times I've seen where it was just utterly wrong about the real reason the error happened, so making it seem all "friendly" seemed to me to just be increasing the misdirection. Also, they are kind of overly verbose for my taste. All in all not as wonderful as all the blog posts had let me to envision in my mind's eye. It is to sigh.

Truly, there are no good programming environments. At least not for my use cases of making truly cross-platform interactive multimedia apps. I wish I was a back end server service type dreamer, my life would be so much less horrible.