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Why I’m Leaving Elm

lukeplant.me.uk

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Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#201

Post by ng12 »

savanaly wrote: post #168

Elm wasn't the right language/community for this author and that's ok, not everything is for everyone. I use and love elm as something to write my side projects in. It has a zen like appeal for many reasons: - No runtime exceptions in practice, so you are developing against the compiler and almost never need to manually test what you're writing - Very opinionated about how to do most things. There's usually just one…

> There's usually just one good library to solve a problem and it solves it in a particular way.

Isn't this the author's core contention? He really needed an i18n library but wasn't allowed(?) to implement it himself and the Elm team wasn't inclined to provide one.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#202

Post by roebk »

As someone who’s been watching Elm since 0.18 and writing Elm since 0.19, I’ve heard similar stories to this in the past.

Elm is a great language for building frontend apps, I feel far more confident and enjoy writing code in Elm than I ever did in JavaScript / TypeScript. It also feels like Elm is becoming a little more stable and hopefully the big breaking changes of the past aren’t going to be as severe moving forward.

I do wish Evan and the core team were a touch more vocal and transparent about future plans and responsive to bugs / issues. There’s a balance to strike here and it doesn’t feel like we’ve hit the sweet spot yet.

I’ll still keep on writing Elm, as it still brings me happiness. I just hope issues like this don’t have an overwhelming impact of the growth of the community.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#203

Post by jlokier »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #179
jlokier wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm writing in response to this remark, presented in the parent to my comment: > he claims that the Elm community will excommunicate you for forking. If that is correct, what I said is less accusation and more descriptive, and should really say something stronger: "the author hasn't presented it that way." However if the parent to my comment is mistaken, then I agree that would make that sentence in my response unfai…

The bit about "excommunication" is very explicitly linked to the author's plan to fork Elm. Now, I don't think "excommunication" is necessarily the correct descriptor. The Elm maintainer who made the threat said that he considered making a fork on "attack" on Elm's goals [1], and that the project would not be greeted with open arms. (Although in the original comment it was a little less clear whether it was the proje…

I don't see anything about making a fork in the linked GitHub issue.

(The word "fork" appears once elsewhere, in an unrelated context in a different comment.)

The thing about open arms is not about forking (or if it is, it's not obvious to me), and reads to me more like "assuming you are not making your own fork, can you please stop pressuring upstream to accomodate designs which are explicitly against our clearly communicated design goals".

The quote is:

> @spookylukey It's one thing to build tooling around an implementation flaw without knowing the history, but that's all pretty well communicated at this point.

> If you understand the design goals, but don't agree with them, why not channel that in a positive way - e.g. by building something that fits your vision instead of directly working against Elm's design goals?

> As someone who has spent a lot of time collaborating with many others to help Elm achieve its stated design goals, intentionally working against those goals feels to me like an attack on our efforts. We have been really clear about our design goals in this area, and you shouldn't expect a project that works against those goals to be greeted with open arms—especially not from those of us who have been working hard for years to achieve those goals.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#204

Post by sergiotapia »

superdisk wrote: post #145

I fully agree with everything listed in this article. One point he alluded to (by mentioning the "friendly" exclamation marks) but didn't fully address is the Elm community's bizarre and infuriating language policing. You can't say the word "guys" in the Slack channel, or a bot will come and correct you, and tell you to say "folks" instead. And from then on, you'll notice the core team all use the word "folks" incess…

>You can't say the word "guys" in the Slack channel, or a bot will come and correct you, and tell you to say "folks" instead.

Yeah I'm not going to be a part of any community that does this. This is the rust community on STEROIDS.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#205

Post by [deleted] »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #162
superdisk wrote: post #145

I fully agree with everything listed in this article. One point he alluded to (by mentioning the "friendly" exclamation marks) but didn't fully address is the Elm community's bizarre and infuriating language policing. You can't say the word "guys" in the Slack channel, or a bot will come and correct you, and tell you to say "folks" instead. And from then on, you'll notice the core team all use the word "folks" incess…

> You can't say the word "guys" in the Slack channel, or a bot will come and correct you, and tell you to say "folks" instead. Being asked to use inclusive language is a weird thing to complain about, especially as the very first example you give. > And from then on, you'll notice the core team all use the word "folks" incessantly in their writing, it's like some weird cult. I use "folks" and other non-gendered langu…

[deleted]

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#206

Post by savanaly »

ng12 wrote: post #201
savanaly wrote: post #168

Elm wasn't the right language/community for this author and that's ok, not everything is for everyone. I use and love elm as something to write my side projects in. It has a zen like appeal for many reasons: - No runtime exceptions in practice, so you are developing against the compiler and almost never need to manually test what you're writing - Very opinionated about how to do most things. There's usually just one…

> There's usually just one good library to solve a problem and it solves it in a particular way. Isn't this the author's core contention? He really needed an i18n library but wasn't allowed(?) to implement it himself and the Elm team wasn't inclined to provide one.

Yeah, that's unfortunate. I haven't run up against anything like that and maybe if I did I would share his viewpoint.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#207

Post by wyager »

SrslyJosh wrote: post #162
superdisk wrote: post #145

I fully agree with everything listed in this article. One point he alluded to (by mentioning the "friendly" exclamation marks) but didn't fully address is the Elm community's bizarre and infuriating language policing. You can't say the word "guys" in the Slack channel, or a bot will come and correct you, and tell you to say "folks" instead. And from then on, you'll notice the core team all use the word "folks" incess…

> You can't say the word "guys" in the Slack channel, or a bot will come and correct you, and tell you to say "folks" instead. Being asked to use inclusive language is a weird thing to complain about, especially as the very first example you give. > And from then on, you'll notice the core team all use the word "folks" incessantly in their writing, it's like some weird cult. I use "folks" and other non-gendered langu…

Using positively connoted words like “inclusive” doesn’t change the fact that most people find these demands on our word choice strange and burdensome.

> Am I in a cult?

Don’t make this personal - the GP is absolutely right that obscure moral proscriptions on language is cult-like behavior, whether or not the people involved are literally in a cult.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#208

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

antew wrote: post #12

I've been working in Elm for a few years, and I feel like I can answer some of the questions. 0.19 introduced a new restriction on Native code (javascript), previously you could compile kernel code in your own projects, now you can't. You've never been able to publish a package using native code to the package site (only packages under the elm or elm-explorations github namespace can). If you feel strongly about it t…

Side-note: "kernel" code is bad naming for JS modules.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#209

Post by novok »

When I researched elm a few years ago, I pretty much came to the same conclusions that the author came about the hard way.

1. The native / non-native split and coming hard deprecation of native, although makes sense from a 'code purity of the ecosystem' perspective, will ultimately be a huge hindrance in practice.

2. Elm specifically puts it's author as the single point of failure, decision making and design, because he wants to make sure the language features are designed right by sacrificing development multithreading.

3. Because of the 2 decisions above, forces elm to effectively be a research / toy language, who's ideas we benefit from the ideas showing up in other languages. Such as elm's error messages probably inspiring rust and swift to improve their error messages. You can't rely on elm as a business.

4. Elm might of been better off not using the browser as it's runtime environment in the end because of the above 3 issues and how bad javascript is and went straight for a flutter or squeak style of implementation setup, which doesn't cause as many 'temptations of native' kinds of issues.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#210

Post by mrozbarry »

Original author of the elm-firebase ( https://github.com/pairshaped/elm-firebase ) here. While I think Elm certainly has some rough patches in both their aggressively PC community and the immaturity of the language (still many breaking changes, not 1.x, etc.), it's not that awful. I was told that elm-firebase was basically a waste, and don't use native modules, so I stopped development. I didn't need to make a big stink, and write a huge blog post on why I'm leaving Elm and how the community is toxic.

If the author needs to leave the community, then do it, but no one needs to leave a community with so much drama.

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