Why I’m Leaving Elm

I‘m not sure why this hasn’t been mentioned by anyone: If you’re unhappy with Elm‘s constraints the obvious solution is to switch to PureScript (purescript.org). It’s basically are more powerful Elm like language with a great FFI and absolutely no constraints how to work with JavaScript. There are also a lot of compatibility packages to provide functions and workflows from the Elm ecosystem.

Started following Luke back when he was doing a lot of Django work. He's not the type to do things "just cuz". Most of his work is well thought out and very reasoned. Big fan of the guy honestly.

Arrogant is the most accurate word to describe Elm and its leadership. I tried to use Elm in production between 0.14 and 0.18 versions and it was fun and mind expanding experience. I'm truly grateful that I've used it because it introduced a lot of functional stuff to me. But I no longer use it myself or recommend it for any serious work.

Breaking changes were negligible in the beginning. But I got fed up with rewriting the app after the 3rd Elm upgrade. I think it's irresponsible to advertise the language to be used in production and break it every fucking year. Speeches about finding the perfect solution are great for academical discussions and toy languages, but you can't just remove the stuff that your community uses without offering any alternative. It all stems from the arrogance and cult-like behavior of the core team. I'm sure that they're wonderful and very smart people who do their best to create the best version of the language that they can. But their management style is too dictatorial and they don't respect their community.

For me, the split started with elm formatter discussion on github. I disagreed with some of decisions that the core devs made and I wanted to see what other developers have been saying about it. On of the issues was the preference for 4-space indentations instead of 2-space. I understand that it's important to have a single source of formatting for the language. But at that time there was no consensus on what amount of spaces to use. Basically, the community divided almost 50/50 between the two. Moreover, a lot of core libraries and example code still used 2-space indentation. (that's why I preferred it). Due to lack of consensus, there was a suggestion to add a flag to formatter to set the indentation. It required to change some parts of code to pass the flag to the formatting module. At that moment, one of the core devs stepped up and closed the discussion because he didn't approve of this decision and he just said that 2-space people should adapt to the new 4-space default (that wasn't supported by any majority). It was the first time when I felt that the Elm management is too strict and I don't want to have anything to do with people with such attitude.

Do you think it is harder to learn than Ocaml/ReasonML though?

I think there is a good free introductory book [1], a welcoming community [2], the language and ecosystem are quite stable nowadays and there's good tooling (now that there's the Spago package manager).

[1] https://leanpub.com/purescript/read [2] https://discourse.purescript.org/

Has anyone started a full fork of the compiler and ecosystem?

It seems like the size of the pool of the "Elm disaffected" is large enough by now that a fork of the entire project might be worthwhile.

I imagine there are a lot of software engineers (like me) who at one time used Elm, but lost interest under the leadership of the core team.