What I find most interesting about Elm as a designer who also "codes", is that because of its bottom up frontend philosophy (types first instead of components first) it somehow assumes that the UI designer and coder is the same person, that there is no clear designer to developer handoff where you hand over a thought out design to implement. It's more the other way round, where you'd hand over what you've come up with in Elm to a designer (which might be another problem because it reduces the designers job to just make things pretty).
So the best use would be for designers who code, basically unifying frontend design and engineering.
A designer can hand over a design to an elm programmer, who would then need to translate that into Elm. It's not hard to do and there are even HTML->Elm tools such as https://mbylstra.github.io/html-to-elm/ for example.
isn't Storyboard based on components (parts) first (atomic design)?
Elm is the opposite, it's focused on the whole which you then use as the basis for parts at actual design time (thinking about layout and hierarchy).
So in a way Elm is about form following function (creating visuals from existing functionality), while most of the other environments are focused on function following form instead (creating functionality based on existing visuals).
You can perfectly do the design-first process with Elm, I thought you were maybe accustomed to Storyboard or something like that.
IMHO you can do design-first process with Elm just like with React. There is no Storyboard equivalent that I'm aware of, but I never found it useful enough but maybe it is, for toolkit/library designers.
I have found that I work differently depending on environment. I do model/types/functionality first if working on my own, but in a corporate environment I typically get designs handed together with some kind of specification, so there I often do "design-first".
>I have found that I work differently depending on environment.
That's the best way to handle this I think. I didn't mean that you can't do specific workflows in either framework or language, just that there is a "native ideal way" of how things are done.
Philosophically it's an interesting topic, because there are many arguments for and against either method. It's also way bigger than programming, it's about evolution itself.
I'm don't mean to nitpick, but did you mean storybook instead of storyboard? That's the only project that I've found which sounds like what you're talking about
So the best use would be for designers who code, basically unifying frontend design and engineering.