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Why I’m Leaving Elm

lukeplant.me.uk

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Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#401

Post by The_Colonel »

haolez wrote: post #395
The_Colonel wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the core team communication, if you fork the project, you are persona non grata in Elm.

But that's the point. The community close to the core team is toxic, according to this post. So, there are incentives for the rest of the community to fork the project and have it their own way. There is no need to be in good terms with the core team.

Burning bridges is a risky approach if you are heavily invested in Elm.

I mean in normal communities it's OK to fork to experiment/support your use case but still participate in the mainstream community.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#402

Post by afiori »

fxtentacle wrote: post #144
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…

The article's criticism about the 0.18 to 0.19 issues is spot-on, but I agree with you that the author comes off as feeling entitled. The reason why Elm is fun to work with is that it's Evan sharing his hobby project with you. And that's it. There is no support, no long-term maintenance, no implied warranty, nothing. Still, it works for me :) and it is Open Source in the way that I can fix bugs myself, if I have to.…

personally I believe this is dependent on the marketing. elm market itself as production ready and reliable. that should mean that existing projects will not be scrapped by design.

I mean, this is even worse than python 2/3

I would totally be on elm side if the project came with a "not ready for long term investment or production" with it.

even in the real world this makes a difference. if I tell you that you can freely camp for the winter on an empty lot and invite some friends for free I cannot just evict you because I found someone who would pay. (in the real case likely you would sign a contract where you renounce this right).

similarly a project that invite users to use it loses some rights in term of calling others entitled when they raise some expectations

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#403

Post by philh »

kazinator wrote: post #394
btilly wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the correction. What he actually said was, "I definitely cannot recommend it to anyone else." Which is fairly translated as, "You probably shouldn't either." But he explicitly didn't say that it was inappropriate for anyone.

I agree with you. The obvious, implicit motivation behind an article like this is to help other users make the same decision. Denying it only constitutes a reinforcing acknowledgement. It's just a rhetorical device. If someone says "I don't mean to be rude, but you're an ass", they in fact mean to be rude. A good chunk of everything you hear and read revolves around people trying to get others to be like them and do…

> The obvious, implicit motivation behind an article like this is to help other users make the same decision.

This is not obvious to me. Why do you assume the motivation is "to help other users make the same decision" and not "to help other users make the decision that's right for them"? I promise you that some people have sometimes written with that motivation in mind. If any denial is taken as proof of guilt, how do you tell those people apart?

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#404

Post by amluto »

neilwilson wrote: post #60
mooted1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your suggestion for the problems with this project is "Why don't you just fork it and maintain your own?"

That's what forking entails. It's a bit like Brexit. You don't get to stay in the club. If there are sufficient people unhappy with Elm but are cohesive enough to push the compiler forward, then why not?

I’ve never used Elm, but that’s not how reasonable open source projects work. Red Hat maintains several rather divergent forks of Linux and they’re still in the club. I personally run a fork of Linux that I maintain, and I’m in the club. The only people who attract serious ire from the club are people who distribute out-of-tree modules that play poorly with the rest of the system. Even in that case, no one gets excommunicated, but the upstream kernel makes no particular effort to keep problematic modules working.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#405

Post by palimpsests »

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…

> The biggest miss in the post in my view is not looking more at using Custom Elements for the internationalization needs

? This wasn't really a technical blog post so I don't think this was a "miss", the points being shared around i18n efforts were meant to support the primary message of the article.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#406

Post by btilly »

jlokier wrote: post #381
btilly wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> the leadership problem > It's only a problem for the ones who misunderstand the model. It's not a problem, it's by design. It's explicitly setup so that Evan has the final say in everything. The fact that they intended to do a stupid thing does not stop it from being a stupid thing. The core development team of Elm is an echo chamber of smart people who only listen to each other. When they are working on problems…

> Open Source BEGAN as a marketing term for a particular software development philosophy BEFORE there was a settled definition for what open source software meant. To this point, one of the founding inspirations was http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral... . Furthermore the practices for how Elm is being developed are exactly against that philosophy. If you're going to bring up the origins of "…

I'm describing how I experienced it as a young developer at the time. It was a weird combination.

Note in particular that a lot of people who jumped on the open source bandwagon were people who wrote some free software but did NOT want to only write free software. And there was a lot of messaging around social norms for how projects worked, why open source made sense, and how to do well by it.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#408

Post by palerdot »

anthonybullard wrote: post #376
jaredklewis wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't doubt it. FWIW, I was really impressed with Elm the language. But I don't see how their current messaging can possibly be working for Elm's benefit. It feels like the PL equivalent of a politician who refuses to shake hands or take selfies. I don't think it requires Elm or Evan to make any technical compromises just to be a little less off-putting.

I have met both Evan and Richard, having been a member of the SF Elm Meetup group. My experiences have shown me that they are both deeply empathetic individuals who are very methodical in their approach to improving the language. Evan spends every Meetup exclusively focused on attendees who've no it's very little experience with the language, basically giving them a personal guided tour. In these sessions here is ver…

> But in their eyes, Elm is not done

I think this is one of the major themes of all the 'Elm dramas' that we have been reading and hearing about. Elm core team should stop recommending it as a stable platform that people can try out (which Elm clearly is not).

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#409

Post by palimpsests »

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…

Given that the interactions described by the author occurred in a community of organisms with central nervous systems that are hardwired to respond to emotional stimuli, I think it's relevant to hear about their experience in that community, on all levels -- emotional, psychological, technological, and so on.

For their stated purpose of the article, I wouldn't have found much added value if I had known a lot of detail about why they using and contributing to this language; the message was clear and direct.

I am fascinated with your interpretation of this post as reading that the author was very much desiring and needing social validation and connection. I didn't have this interpretation. Are there some specific things in the post they said that led you to this point of view?

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#410

Post by skrebbel »

lmm wrote: post #386
holtalanm wrote: post #8

Earlier 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…

Did you ever try Scala.js? I was a huge fan of how fully it was just standard Scala and therefore well-supported by IntelliJ; I've not seen any other compile-to-JS language match that level of IDE experience (but as someone who was already a Scala fan I'm biased).

A bit of an open door maybe, but TypeScript has that level of IDE experience too.
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