Serious question: how popular is Elm? I've recently seen some tutorials showing up and anecdotally know some friends that have played around with it, but I haven't seen any job postings for it and so I'm wondering if it's just hyped up or if there is real demand for Elm developers professionally.

Neither, really. I'd say it has the largest community out of the various compile-to-js statically typed FP langs, at least with an explicit front-end focus.

- PureScript has a small but passionate community, one of the biggest players in that community laid off their whole ps team so that doesn't bode well.

- ReasonML fractured into ReScript but left half the Reason community behind, it's a confusing space to navigate now.

- GHCJS...

Most (perhaps even all) of the job postings end up on the elm slack (rather than, say, reddit or other more visible places).

There was some controversy with the release of 0.19 a couple of years ago, and general contempt (in the wider community, not inside Elm) for the way the language is developed and run which means there isn't a great deal of buzz about it outside of those already using it.

If you don't have the urge to jump off a hill when you see heavy pragmatism, Typescript is very popular and well maintained. My experience is only positive.

I was also wondering, does Blazor work with F#? That could also be an option. Not a front-end focused language but a front-end focused framework, so, there's that.

I truly believe TypeScript is the only true way forward for frontend web programming.

Now what we really need is a functional dialect which compiles to TypeScript...

TypeScript or Flow for that matter sucks at using functional style with immutable data types. There are ESLint plugins that allows to enforce immutability with plain JS objects, but still lack of syntactic sugar or union types makes the experience much worse then in functional languages.

Only stage 2, so whether it'll get through to next stage is up in the air, will depend on interest (compare to Temporal which started fairly slow but has gained huge momentum recently and is now at stage 3 and engine testing level) but it's encouraging.