Elm has interested me for a while now; particularly as I get more and more into Haskell (one of the languages that inspired Elm). While I generally find Haskell's error messages to actually be quite helpful, there are certainly times where they could be a little more useful.
Well done, so far! I hope this kind of effort is eventually undertaken by many compilers (and their authors), as everyone benefits from simplifying the debugging/refactoring process.
Haskell error messages have come a long way. These days, they're generally (not quite uniformly) helpful and specific, at the cost of being a bit verbose.
I can eyeball-grep the relevant parts of a verbose message, if it actually has useful information in it. That is, I'll take verbose-but-specific-and-helpful over terse-but-not-useful-information any day.
I agree, for sure, on balance. Terse and equally useful is of course ideal, but often impossible.
That said, "eyeball-grepping" a specific set of messages, along with which bits are important, is a learned skill. I have found myself many times trying to fix the wrong thing because I skimmed and wound up with a wrong understanding of what the error was. And then found a more careful read told me precisely what was needed.
Well done, so far! I hope this kind of effort is eventually undertaken by many compilers (and their authors), as everyone benefits from simplifying the debugging/refactoring process.