What I learned from this article: All Elm developers are equal, but some are more equal than others.
And that distinction seems to be very, very clear.
Why I’m Leaving Elm
131–140 of 450 posts
Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would they do? I'm not sure there's an actual threat to follow through on. They can't block a forked compiler from, for example, using official packages without close-sourcing their own compiler (to prevent it from bringing in whatever change makes it work again). At that point, why bother respecting the threat? A forked compiler isn't going to get maintainers? A package depending on the forked compiler isn't go…
The community is more valuable than the code, because the community writes the code. So being cut off from the community is a major blow to a fork, and substantially increases their work burden.
Your fork isn't a significant amount of work, unless they've really threaded in the must-be-in-Elm-Kernel check throughout the entire compiler. Versus trying to rewrite your dependency in Elm rather than enabling importing JS, enabling JS is likely to be simpler since the functionality already exists to let Kernel modules do it.
Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm
#133For me, the best thing I got from this critique was the link to this 2018 talk by Evan: The Hard Parts of Open Source, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4EX4dPppA I found Evan's talking style really entertaining and enjoyable, and I totally relate to the first part about "why don't you just..." and "have you thought about delegation..."! The HN comments here are near uniformly negative towards Elm and supportive of L…
> That came over to me as "you are obliged to do a lot more work that I want you to do, on your own time and personal cost, and to stop developing the project according to your own vision or you are a bad person". I mention this in my top-level comment, but here's Rich Hickey of Clojure responding to similar assertions: https://old.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/73yznc/on_whose_au... > Clojure was not originally prima…
> The people who write these "I'm leaving X" posts must know they have disproportional power in such a tiny pond.
This is what I find so disappointing and likely why many "thin-skinned" users come out to defend the language when posts like this come out.
Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except those BDFLs give you escape hatches to do whatever you want. Elm removed it. It's the same as Clojure, if they didn't let you use your own Java libraries. Or if you couldn't write C extensions for Python. Rich Hickey isn't going to chastise you for resorting to a Java library if you have to, because despite Clojure being an opinionated language, at the end of the day he's pragmatic, which is why Java interop i…
Maybe this extreme limitation is necessary in the Elm's author vision. It's open source. You can always fork and implement your own vision. In fact, you're encouraged to do so.
Did you read the blogpost? Apparently you're not encouraged to do so.
Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
both?
What do you mean?
is a joke: https://bigc.at/tabs-vs-spaces.orz
Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would they do? I'm not sure there's an actual threat to follow through on. They can't block a forked compiler from, for example, using official packages without close-sourcing their own compiler (to prevent it from bringing in whatever change makes it work again). At that point, why bother respecting the threat? A forked compiler isn't going to get maintainers? A package depending on the forked compiler isn't go…
This discussion about whether or not the "Elm community" will be meanies is missing the point and inventing a hypothetical scenario where you get kicked out of some club. Kind of a weird conjecture to me. I guarantee nobody truly cares that you fork Elm. The thing is that generally people who threaten to fork Elm are quite hostile on the Elm forums and subreddit. If you fork Elm, an already tiny ecosystem, you'll rea…
I don't understand your argument about ecosystem being far more important. People ceasing use of any of the tools necessarily removes them from the ecosystem and community. They have no reason to care about those things.
Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't really solve the problem. How do you format this code with tabs: function name(arg1, arg2, arg3 The other issue is with maximum line length. If you have a maximum line length of 80, do tabs count as 2 spaces, 4 spaces, or 8 spaces towards meeting that line length? Using spaces ensures that it at least looks consistent, independent of your tabstop settings.
> It doesn't really solve the problem. How do you format this code with tabs: function name(arg1, arg2, arg3 Just wondering… do you realign the parameters every time you rename a function?
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Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep! If people used tabs, then everyone can display it how they like and these stupid discussions wouldn’t be necessary. Alas, for some reason the world has rallied behind spaces. Sigh.
It doesn't really solve the problem. How do you format this code with tabs: function name(arg1, arg2, arg3 The other issue is with maximum line length. If you have a maximum line length of 80, do tabs count as 2 spaces, 4 spaces, or 8 spaces towards meeting that line length? Using spaces ensures that it at least looks consistent, independent of your tabstop settings.
I wouldn't do it, but this works perfectly fine. The rule is "use tabs to indent blocks of code, use spaces to align within those blocks".
function name(arg1, arg2,
arg3)Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm
#139These posts (and HN comments) really make me wonder if adopters of fringe languages are always going to be thin-skinned developers who get emotional when they realize they won't be part of the language's design decisions. That "On Whose Authority" rant about Clojure complains about the exact same things. And I'll refer to Rich Hickey's response: https://old.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/73yznc/on_whose_au... . Elm in…
Thank you! Well put.
Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm
#140This came at an awkward time. I just bought Richard Feldman's book "Elm in Action" a few days ago and was working through the first 2 chapters. This has made me reconsider my intention use Elm in my startup. Having features randomly fail on me and having to rewrite an entire library in elm vs calling out to js means less time creating features that matter to my customers! I was drawn to elm as a way of spending less…
You can call out to JS using ports and custom elements and accomplish nearly everything you could possibly need. This blog post is focusing on a largely undocumented, always discouraged "feature" (used loosely, as even from its inception it was verboten, couldn't be distributed via the official package manager, etc.) which allowed users to hack library support directly into the Elm language while risking (and losing!) many of the guarantees Elm provides. Whether it's a good fit for your startup is another question, but I just wanted to assuage that concern.