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Why I’m Leaving Elm

lukeplant.me.uk

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Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#271

Post by Talanes »

jlokier wrote: post #245
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment immediately before rtfeldman's references patching the compiler for this project, which is an implied necessity if js code is to continue to be used. It's essentially a soft-fork, and that is what rtfeldman is objecting to.

Thanks, fair enough although rtfeldman appears to be responding to spookeylukey about divergent design goals, while it's norpan who is talking about maintaining a locally patched compiler. I still see no objections to maintaining a fork or local patch from rtfeldman. Just "if you go against our explicit design goals don't expect us to want to merge it upstream for first-class support". TBH a locally patched compiler…

IT was norpan and spookeylukey talking about patching the compiler together, and rtfeldman jumping in with references to PAST discussions of design goals with spookeylukey.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#272

Post by AzzieElbab »

bwanab wrote: post #141

After reading a large number of the responses here, I feel like I've noticed a pattern - two types of comments: 1) I've used the language and agree with the conclusions of the post even if I don't necessarily agree with every point. 2) I haven't used the language, but I believe open source projects must be maintained by their maintainers as they see fit. I actually agree with both of these positions, but, having used…

Out of curiosity, what keeps you from pinning elm version in your projects unless you are a library developer?

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#273

Post by rcxdude »

popara wrote: post #269

When I decided to commit my project to Elm, back in 2017, I have seen all those writings on the wall. Basically I am buying in someone's whim. One caveat is that I can stop following his whim, freeze source code that I need and carry on my development with out needing or caring about future releases, ie, I do the dreadful fork. I work alone so I choose my tech destiny. But when you look at the guy at which will you a…

> Luke is off and rude in this post at least. He is considered about the posture of OSS not the real benefits of it. Why Luke didn't came up with big blog post about the features he would like to see in Elm? Much more constructive than bitching about it.

Sounds like he has done a lot of talking about features he would like to see (as well as work to realise them), and gotten nothing but dismissal and inaction for it. I think this blog post is probably the most constructive thing left he could do.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#274

Post by strken »

diggan wrote: post #59
kazinator wrote: post #19

I don't agree with everything here. Open source really does mean that you just have all the code to rebuild the thing from scratch under the right sort of license. Open source doesn't mean anything else, like having access to design decisions. Interaction style and personalities are also not part of the definition of open source; open source doesn't mean nobody is brusque or abrasive. Some communities have additional…

Agree. I'm gonna be honest and say I haven't finished the entire article so author might have elaborated further after, but I got a chill when reading the following passage: > The second is that if you advertise something as Open Source, there is a common set of assumptions about what that means, some of which are explicit in accepted definitions of the term. It seems the "common set of assumptions" is around that pe…

Part of the problem here is that he suggested forking (he used the word "patching") the compiler in another project, and one of the core maintainers of Elm jumped into the issue and said it felt like an attack on Elm itself.

That feels a bit silly - why make a project open source if you're going to get upset when someone forks it?

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#275

Post by rcxdude »

geocar wrote: post #227
hombre_fatal wrote: post #53

These 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…

It's a peculiar demographic I've noticed amongst people who have grown up with all their software available gratis or ad-supported. "Oh this incredibly hard work that someone else did for free isn't exactly what I wanted and they refuse to change it the way I want for free" If Elm is so great, and if it's 99% there, and you only need "this one little custom operator" added, or this "special piece of extension code" a…

It doesn't sound like they were expecting someone else to do it: they did it themselves but the maintainers were not open to the idea.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#276

Post by mellow2020 »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #85
jlokier wrote: post #80

For 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…

> Nobody would even read your post.

Is there anything factual in the post you take issue with?

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#277

Post by sbarre »

AzzieElbab wrote: post #272
bwanab wrote: post #141

After reading a large number of the responses here, I feel like I've noticed a pattern - two types of comments: 1) I've used the language and agree with the conclusions of the post even if I don't necessarily agree with every point. 2) I haven't used the language, but I believe open source projects must be maintained by their maintainers as they see fit. I actually agree with both of these positions, but, having used…

Out of curiosity, what keeps you from pinning elm version in your projects unless you are a library developer?

Not the OP, but I can think of a few reasons:

  * security patches
  * browser compatibility changes
  * build tooling compatibility (unless you pin that too, but that never works for long)

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#278

Post by bartread »

bwanab wrote: post #141

After reading a large number of the responses here, I feel like I've noticed a pattern - two types of comments: 1) I've used the language and agree with the conclusions of the post even if I don't necessarily agree with every point. 2) I haven't used the language, but I believe open source projects must be maintained by their maintainers as they see fit. I actually agree with both of these positions, but, having used…

> But, as many others have pointed out, if one has to maintain a project over the years, the breaking changes in the language would have caused great bouts of teeth gnashing.

This isn't just a problem for Elm but for front-end development in general. Not so much because of JavaScript the language, but because of the libraries and, to a much lesser extent, the browser APIs.

In the library and framework space many take semver as license to completely rework their APIs with every major version bump because they "got it wrong" last time around. It's pretty infuriating because in most cases whatever benefits the new API offers are generally fairly marginal and not worth the cost of all the reworking that needs to be done.

I'd always rather an API was stable than perfect because, for one thing, you're never going to achieve that perfection you dream of. There will always be some new use case or better conceptualisation that you didn't think of and, really, all you're doing much of the time is thrashing by pursuing this. To me it often seems like immature software engineering.

I haven't written any Java for a very long time, but I know that C# code I wrote back in 2004 targetting .NET 1.1 would still run substantially unmodified today on the latest .NET runtimes[1] - in fact I'm pretty sure some of it is.

[1] Possibly not .NET Core, but certainly the classic runtime.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#279

Post by rcxdude »

mwfunk wrote: post #263

This is a ton of emotionally charged verbiage about community interactions here, but at any point does this person say what they were using Elm to do? That seems like a pretty important point. Is this somebody who was just using the language recreationally, for their own amusement? And if so, did they have some expectation for the language community to be a source of (online) social interactions and connections with…

I mean, he goes into some detail about the issue: he wants to be able to use an internationalisation library, but the best option is in javascript, and these libraries are very hard to write because i18n is really hard with a bunch of edge cases. He also gives evidence that some commercial apps using Elm really need this functionality. He wrote bindings so it could be used in Elm, it worked well, but the core team were not interested in his solution, seemed to misunderstand the problem, and will not allow anyone else to solve it without an outright fork (which the core team act extremely hostile towards).

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#280

Post by Myrmornis »

After reading that I’m fairly clear in my mind that Elm is something I will avoid if possible. The author seems extremely credible to me and several of the quotes entirely damning. For example, the one where the core team / leader ended a communication by saying that they weren’t interested in hearing alternative views but that they did want feedback on whether their communication was clear. I cannot imagine that behind those words lie people I would want to work with.
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