31–40 of 89 posts
I loved Elm, and it's disappointing it never achieved critical mass. We wrote a few front-ends with it about 6 years ago. Very easy to write, debug, and deploy
Though I’m convinced it didn’t reach critical mass purely because of community management issues mentioned in the post. Too many people just threw their hands in the air and divested from Elm because of it. Not everybody wrote a blog post about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SUM4869ODc
I'd encourage everyone to watch that as a grain of salt to TFA. It seems like the project leader felt he was being taken advantage of, and was just not getting out as much as he was putting in. That's his decision to make and he doesn't owe anyone anything. If you want continued support, pay up.
Elm's governance and process are what made it such a delight to use. Instead of allowing the full spectrum of bad ideas in frontend development to slowly make their way into the language, the authors carefully curated a coherent set of good ideas. They said no to a lot of things, and cut out as often as put in. This is going to piss off a lot of people because it means saying no to a lot of people. Saying yes to those people would make the language worse; you can't have it both ways.
Since Elm compiles to JavaScript, all the new development features from JavaScript, HTML, and CSS are also instantly available in Elm. I.e. it's not necessary to change Elm all the time to keep it up to date with the web platform. For non-stop Elm content check out all the communities at https://elm-lang.org/community
I think this post captures the wave of entitlement among a group of Elm participants of that era that led to what looks like catastrophic burnout in evancz, Elm's creator. It's been a while since I watched them, and I recommend his talks, but at least one or two of his talks are centered around what is basically unfair expectations. In one talk, [bad paraphrasing, but] he compares how people's expectations of him and…
Basically, Evan decided he wanted Elm to be a pre-packaged closed ecosystem where it was easy to develop very simple standalone apps, but made it very difficult to impossible to actually integrate with any existing JavaScript code or libraries. This was a baffling decision to people who thought Elm was supposed to be a practical language. Blaming everything on "entitlement" from people who bought Elm's marketing abou…
This is why open source governance is so important. Technical excellence is orthogonal to community management excellence, and you can't scale an open source project without some measure of the latter.
tl;dr: the Elm compiler has a hardcoded whitelist of projects allowed to use certain critical language features, and anyone who releases a fork of the compiler without that antifeature gets banned from the project's community.
Elm is not dead. Here some recent commits: https://github.com/search?q=stars%3A%3E1+language%3Aelm&type... Since Elm compiles to JavaScript, all the new development features from JavaScript, HTML, and CSS are also instantly available in Elm. I.e. it's not necessary to change Elm all the time to keep it up to date with the web platform. For non-stop Elm content check out all the communities at https://elm-lang.org/com…
The author is critical primarily of Elm's governance and processes, and claims that these are what killed the project. I don't think that's entirely true. There was a recent interview with the creator of Elm here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SUM4869ODc I'd encourage everyone to watch that as a grain of salt to TFA. It seems like the project leader felt he was being taken advantage of, and was just not getting ou…
IMO it's safe to say that Elm is dead and won't come back with this attitude of the core team (which is not the only problem of the language). We never switched to Elm 0.19 from 0.18 but moved on to rewrite in Svelte 5 with TypeScript and never looked back.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's dead, maybe it just doesn't know it yet.
No, its not. They are focused on introducing ELM on the backend as well. ELM isn't backed by big corpos like Rust and Go do so their way of operation will differ by a huge margin than those two langs, especially in terms of marketing so its inaccurate to judge that its dead just due to the inactivity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SUM4869ODc
I think this post captures the wave of entitlement among a group of Elm participants of that era that led to what looks like catastrophic burnout in evancz, Elm's creator. It's been a while since I watched them, and I recommend his talks, but at least one or two of his talks are centered around what is basically unfair expectations. In one talk, [bad paraphrasing, but] he compares how people's expectations of him and…
Author addresses this at the beginning, but I disagree with them: >This means that even if a single person wrote every line of code of a language's compiler themselves, when it comes to thinking about the project, they need to think of themselves as stewards and not owners I respect the author if they believe this and stick to it (they are involved in OS too), but for the rest of us this is a sure way to burn out.