I remember using Elm in one of my gigs. After I left, the client hated me. Not to forget all the drama that it had before Covid. I really want this language to succeed, but its bdfl is trying hard....
Road to Elm 1.0
21–30 of 192 posts
Re: Road to Elm 1.0
#22There's a lot to love about Elm, and I've written quite a bit of production code with it starting around 0.18.0. But in 2026 I'm not sure why a company would newly choose a language that hasn't otherwise been updated in nearly 7 years.
Stability. It works. Frequent breaking changes to core functionality of your tech stack is not a feature, it’s a bug.
Does it though? They are many longstanding bugs reported in their compiler repository, and this release doesn't seem to address any of them.
Re: Road to Elm 1.0
#23Oh my God, I had no idea this project was still alive. I don't mean to throw any shade but I had assumed that the lid was on this turkey.
The project was dead. The previous release was 7 years ago, where it stopped because the creator (same as author of this announcement) stopped maintaining it and since the community hasn't progress beyond a BDFL-model that's where it died. So it was dead, it just now has been resurrected (and AFAIK with a whithered community in the meantime).
your definition of dead is elms definition of stability, I think :D haha
javascriptland really warps peoples minds on stability and project-liveness
Re: Road to Elm 1.0
#24What is the point of actively choosing a web framework in the age of LLMs?
Statically typed languages with compiler hints are the absolute best languages for LLM's to work with. Successful compilation is incredible feedback, and it basically just means that there is a higher chance that the feature is in a complete and working state at the end of each agent iteration.
Re: Road to Elm 1.0
#25Wish them all the best, I really respected the efforts made to normify some of ideas with unapologetic mathematic names like monads and such
But then you see stuff like this https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/
The author is very charitable in their description of the Elm Core teams actions in these interactions, but you read it and they come off entirely unaccountable and dismissive. If they want to make a purely functional language locked down, you really should be upfront that they don't have time to make sure basic parts of the web ecosystem are arbitrarily locked off like i18n until they decide users of their langauge are permitted to use it after ruling out any suggestion it doesn't undermine the purity they were going for.
https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/bindings-for-intl/1264
Gonna be honest, really got the impression the maintainer here couldn't be stuffed looking to it, and wasn't personally impacted and largely didn't give a shit. Proceeds to run off some bullshit to dismiss the issue entirely about it being too risky (he had better things to do, and anyone he can delegate this too does too), the poster offers to do the work write a report, etc, etc. Then he's ghosted and for some reason the thread is shut after 10 days lol??? I guess giving him the dignity of a reply is out of the core teams hands because of how they arbitrarily configured their discourse.
Don't blame that dude for leaving Elm, glad I never made the mistake of wasting my time being dependent on its infantilizating runtime.
Look if you want to avoid being too coupled to the runtime your language exists in, sounds like a cool experiment, but maybe don't drag everyone along with you until you figure out the basic issues.
All that is 6 years ago hopefully they're more self aware.
Re: Road to Elm 1.0
#26Did the restrictions on JavaScript get resolved? IIRC, they made it so you had to use their “Ports” mechanism to interface with JavaScript, and you couldn’t write your own wrappers.
There was some drama when someone forked it so you could write your own JavaScript wrappers/FFI too?
Re: Road to Elm 1.0
#27used elm between 2016-17. it taught me a lot of things - such as simplicity. when I ended up switching to react - redux was easy to pick up cz of elm. sadly the ecosystem never grew. but oh man elm is nice & the apps were performant.
What's the Elm definition of simplicity? Genuinely asking, because the concept of simplicity is very vague and overloaded in programming.
Re: Road to Elm 1.0
#28Did they walk back that thing where certain language features could only be used by the Elm team? That seemed like a language-killer to me.
Re: Road to Elm 1.0
#29Oh my God, I had no idea this project was still alive. I don't mean to throw any shade but I had assumed that the lid was on this turkey.
I'm not deeply involved in the community, but I know people who were, and my understanding is the removal of custom infix operators lost a lot of community support. Very popular feature removed specifically because the creator of the language didn't like it, and despite large community cries for it to remain.
In my eyes, it was probably the right decision technically, but deeply unpopular and probably the wrong decision socially.
Re: Road to Elm 1.0
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
The project was dead. The previous release was 7 years ago, where it stopped because the creator (same as author of this announcement) stopped maintaining it and since the community hasn't progress beyond a BDFL-model that's where it died. So it was dead, it just now has been resurrected (and AFAIK with a whithered community in the meantime).
your definition of dead is elms definition of stability, I think :D haha javascriptland really warps peoples minds on stability and project-liveness
This, 200 times. No weekly news does not mean dead. In some specific places like this one, it means stable.
(And also arguably, for good or bad reasons, why it will never become mainstream).