Apparently a human-readable homoiconic language is still an unsolved problem...
In 0.17, commands and subscriptions mean that, not matter how deep you nest components, you can still send and receive messages to/from the outside world (i.e. ports).
Most of these comments boil down to, "the food's awful and the portions are too small!". Someone wants better JS interop because Elm will be a small part of their stack; someone wants server-side and isomorphic apps because Elm will be a large part of their stack. Yes, the tooling and language features have a long way to go, and hopefully Evan will make progress while at NoRedInk. If you enjoy Haskell, you're not really Elm's target audience. If you hawkishly watch HN, you're probably not the target audience - the point is that it's sane programming for the rest of us.
Morse code, alpha bravo charlie, ASCII... there's actually a long history of doing this. Maybe not one meant for easy of memorization and drawing though. Even Mark Whatney had to be taught Morse code on Mars.
(Yes the phonetic alphabet is meant for ease of hearing by people, but writing a program to understand 26 distinct sounds can't be nearly as hard as natural language transcription.)
I'll opine: git's sense of semantics seems to rival JavaScript's ("sure I'll add an int and a string"). I checkout branches but also checkout files to undo unstaged changes, but staged changes are a reset. How about "undo" as a word people would understand? Nope, doesn't do anything. Can I get a log function that shows the commit history by default? And when I check out a branch it says I'm up to date with origin/branchname but it's lying because that's just the local copy and it hasn't done a fetch. And of course in 2.0 they didn't try to clean anything up, they just changed a few defaults.
I think I deserve a medal for understanding enough git to get by. Specifically, a purple heart.
Probably not in the next few years. However, this sort of thing is in the back of people's minds. There was a question of dropping the Int type a while back, and the objections (besides semantics, e.g. indices are always ints) included wanting to be able to compile to machine code, where (unlike JS) ints and floats were different.
If you mean parsing by machine, the solution is to have a separate machine-readable output (JSON perhaps). If you mean comprehension, that's a valid point that is being discussed elsewhere on the page.
In 0.17, commands and subscriptions mean that, not matter how deep you nest components, you can still send and receive messages to/from the outside world (i.e. ports).