I have a hypothesis that people treat open source a little like the way that some managers and product managers treat software engineers — as dispensable, as people that shouldn't have authority or control, as people that don't know what the best is for the product. Unfortunately this isn't true. Empathetic makers — the ones that are most successful — are often deeply in touch with (a) needs of customers and (b) know what they are capable of offering. Unfortunately, what individuals offer is often not thought of as a gift (in both the open source world and in business), but rather as a given. This orientation is harmful to the human spirit, but unfortunately we have grown used to it in our world of seemingly endless commodities.
Why I’m Leaving Elm
151–160 of 450 posts
Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm
#152For 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".
But he didn't ask for work to be done anywhere in the article? He asks that he not be prevented from writing code that the compiler supports, but which is arbitrarily limited to members of certain organizations. That's not asking for work.
I feel like if you make it so that users of your platform cannot do certain work for themselves, and instead must await you doing the work, you are basically creating the entitlement. You now owe it to them, in some sense, to do the work, since you have intentionally blocked them from doing it themselves.
I mean, it's open source. You have no contract with the maintainers and so there is no real entitlement to any specific behavior. Hell they could have the compiler try to detect whether you're someone who engages in wrongthink and refuse to work for you if so, and you'd have no legal right to complain.
On the other hand, it's plain that there is a certain slice of the population who doesn't prefer this paternalistic approach to software tools. If the Evans of the world wish to remain atop their ivory tower, then they will be the recipients of an incrementally higher frequency of rage-quit posts as a result. Should doesn't enter into it. That's just how it is.
Personally my advice is if you're not into opinionated BDFLs blocking you from doing things for non-technical reasons, don't use ecosystems controlled by BDFLs who have a habit of doing this. So, I won't be using Elm, and that's probably for the best both for me and the Elm core maintainers.
Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm
#153These 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…
Thanks for posting this, it's important.
Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm
#154Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment. It is called "smart tabs" and good text editors already implement it.
If you use spaces, you can check that files are okay by forbidding \t. If you use tabs, you can check that files are okay by forbidding /^\t* /. If you use tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment, ??????
My editor maintains it automatically, so it is never wrong. There is nothing to check.
I'm sure there is a command-line pre-commit formatter I could use. But I have never tried to set it up, since I can reformat existing code with a couple of keystrokes in my editor.
Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm
#156Elm gets taken out behind the woodshed again on hacker news. Remind me not to open source software.
Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
this is, at least, consistent with my experience using elm on a side project. Dropped elm like a hot potato when I hit that wall. frustrating, too, because I was really enjoying the language, and everything about it up to that point. The tooling support for Elm is REALLY solid compared to some other functional compile-to-js languages out there. If anyone is looking for a good functional compile-to-js language, I woul…
My brief experience has been similar. Elm is a dictatorship that could be wonderful if it didn't exist in the realm of messy html/js. I experience an icky feeling of stockholm-syndrome part of the time, and just plain frustration at other times when dealing with Elm. What's infuriating is that I do see the benefit of some degree of strict stewardship. It's just that it's too much in this case.
The use of "dictatorship" in your comment brought a smile to my face because I thought of the BDFL title given to Python's creator ... and then imagined the Elm team forgot the "B" at the beginning of the acronym. Note that I have no personal experience with Elm and am in no position to take sides. The comment just describes the mental image I got from your comment's ink blot.
Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm
#158I loved the Elm architecture even though I left it behind a couple of years ago because it developed into an explosion of files with a fairly large project.
I hardly interacted with the community (although I think I remember that slack bot correcting people for using 'guys') but the architecture is both conceptually simple and great and should be emulated.
Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same. We founded on Haskell but had some need to more front-end oriented code. Can say Elm was never considered because I was hearing this weird stuff back in 2016--not to mention it would just make hiring even harder. Can't trust tooling that will be capricious.
What did you settle on, considering you were otherwise Haskell focused?
Typescript. We try not to be type/pl theory fanatics. Choose your tools well. Haskell is great since the core of our product is an interpreter/compiler with multiple stages. But I don't wanna use it everywhere.
Personally I'd be using JS (or TS) + jQuery. Almost no dependencies, but a lot more manual. No one would be happy on the team if we did this of course. And it can be impractical
Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But they’re almost certainly moving to a new platform with a community, which is much easier than trying to build one from scratch.