How to sell Elm to your client / boss

Ok, you just got obsessed by Elm like many other passionate developers. After doing little example projects, you understand that it’ll dominate the programming world in 2 to 3 years. You feel like that, but you really don’t know how you can easily sell that to your client.

First, you can convince him with my previous post talking about how great Elm is.

Then, try to think in terms of development costs, and how much the client will stop throwing away by doing Elm on the Front End.

Then think in terms of reusability. As soon as you do something complex once, you can reuse it really easily in Elm. So even if the community is small, there are a lot of reusable functions out there that you already can implement into your project easily.

Ambition is also a key concept here. Does your boss have the ambition to do something really amazing ? Then you need to prevent bugs from happening. Elm is one of the easiest ways to do that.

Refactoring ease is also a key argument : if you need to dive into your project again in 2 months, it’ll be a lot easier in Elm than it is in javascript.

Then the client/boss will ask you about how to find Elm developers in order to scale. That’s when you point him to the local community (paris elm meetup group for example, but you can create yours easily on meetup.com), and the slack channel: http://elmlang.herokuapp.com/, and an online job board to show them.

That last section gave me the idea to create an Elm job board : https://elm.jobboardmaker.com. You can post your offers here if you need someone to assist you in your Elm projects ! And if your boss asks how he can bring other developers up to speed quickly, you can point him to dailydrip.com.

Then the client/boss will ask why nobody did functional programming before ? The answer is that functional programming for user interfaces needs remarkable thinking, because it’s not instant, but Elm creators did the hard work and you can benefit from it.

Any other ideas ? Let me know !