Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)

Now I understand, the author is (or was, I suppose) a core team member of Elm, I thought it were someone that commented on the post instead. I interpret "showed up on HN" to typically mean a commenter rather than an article author as typically many authors don't even realize their article was submitted to HN on any particular day.

Actually, it comes from the concrete complaints specified in the article, such as the total exclusion from official Elm spaces if you try to fix your own problems. If it was what you described, i.e. the inability to do things within the packaging ecosystem, that would be acceptable; that was the status quo in 0.18 and everyone dealt with it.

The basis for calling complaints about functionality 'entitlement' is that you put it into the world because you want to, and the default avenue for other people getting what they want is to put it into the world themselves. If you lure people to get invested in your project, cause a problem for anyone invested in your project, and attempt to prevent them from solving their problem themselves, then you are behaving irresponsibly and complaints about this do not stem from 'entitlement'.

The author addresses exactly those sorts of talks you discuss, including explicitly showing how Evan made fun of the author after, even politely, making a criticism (if you could even call it that) of the language.

This is one of the major things that turned me off of Elm after having used it for a few years, the transformation of its supporters to essentially becoming fanboys instead, insisting that Evan could do no wrong, and that the very real criticisms of the community were merely "entitlements." The community simply became cult like in a way I have not seen before or since, in any language or technology discussion. Even in this thread you have people saying to avoid reading the article entirely and that surely the language is not dead despite not having a new version in almost 7 years.

Creators can make whatever decisions they want, but consumers can do so just as well, opting largely to leave the language and ecosystem.

It is just the same as any other organizational leader, if it's getting to be too much, get others to join in to lead, delegate tasks, and the last solution, allow others to take your place and leave the organization. Not everyone is cut out to be a leader and we should not waste everyone's time forcing or pretending that it were so.

From the comments:

> I was very excited for this interview but felt like Evan really didn’t say much of substance and largely avoided the interesting questions

>> It was a total pity party, dude acts like he invented bottled water

>>> Except, no, he doesn't act like that. He did invent something new, though, that is valuable to a lot of people. In spite of this he's still humble; outside of jealousy I'm not sure how you can justify saying he's acting like that. Why did you watch this video? To pick on Evan or Elm?

>>>> And to your insidious question, I reject the premise as neither of your hateful canned options for me fit the bill. You can spend your days defending people you don’t know, I will spend mine critiquing publicly what is obvious: Even thought he’d end up like Van Rossum or Dahl but he forgot the part where your creation brings something new to market—he only brought a new way of creating something that was already in the market (web applications). When will people get it through their skulls that can’t monetize anything if you’re unwilling to let others be involved in your work aside from throwing money at you. It’s completely ridiculous and naive and he’s butt hurt over this realization.

Another thread:

> For my part, the Elm ship has mostly sailed. I can't ignore the fact that the bdfl disappeared for multiple years without notice. That's not how trust is built.

>> i mean did Elm cease to be a perfectly usable language in the interim? what part of the FOSS social contract made you think he was obligated to provide notice?

>>> No one is "obligated" to do anything. I'm not obligated to put in effort to keep in contact with my friends and family, but if I don't I also can't be mad if our relationships drift apart. No, Evan isn't obligated to do anything with Elm that he doesn't want to do, but we also shouldn't be surprised if people question the suitability of a language, if the BDFL just up and disappears. A language isn't a small, one or two file, library that I can just copy paste and fix a bug, if the maintainer isn't reacting to issues or accepting pull requests. And it certainly isn't something that I want to take over the full burden of maintaining. So I need to know that I can, at the very least, work with the maintainers to fix issues as they come up. The view on open source is also extremely negative. Evan was offered a lot of chances to have other people come in and to build a strong core team for Elm. And there are many open source projects (including languages), that operate very successfully around that model and even manage to rotate people out, if they become exhausted with the project. So while I in no way condone attacking Evan directly, it's also fair to acknowledge that there are very good reasons people aren't investing into Elm for their next big project.

This sort of community is part of why I left Elm too, supporters seem to have an immediate knee jerk reaction to any sort of criticism and literally seem to treat Evan as some sort of messiah figure, unreasonable things like, "well, it never said anywhere that people have to give notice" if they're going to have radio silence for 5+ years, like, yeah, but it'd be a good faith effort if they did.