My impression of Elm was that it's trying to create a platform for real-time interaction (e.g. games, UIs, etc.) that happens to target the browser. There's a constant undercurrent of practicality in the community: for example, new language features are regarded suspiciously, and modifications to existing behaviour are only made when they reduce the burden of complexity to the programmer. Obviously it's a language that has yet to hit 1.0 so there are occasionally large swings in its design, but apparently they've become more stable as of late (I'm only picked it up ~1 month ago).

The only unpractical part I'd noticed was its perspective on reusing components, as seen in this overview under 'Nesting' [1]. That bit of explicit routing aside, may I ask what dissuaded you from using the language seriously?

[1]: https://gist.github.com/evancz/2b2ba366cae1887fe621#nesting