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Road to Elm 1.0

elm-lang.org

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Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#91

Post by [deleted] »

hollowturtle wrote: post #66
auslegung wrote: post #19

About two years ago I was experimenting with ChatGPT vibecoding a snake game in the browser in elm, because elm is my favorite language. It was rough going and I concluded at the time that LLM‘s might kill elm. Today I use elm in production and LLMs are vastly better at it, and if anything I think LLM‘s might increase elm adoption because it is the ideal language for an LLM right now. It’s a simpler language than mos…

> I think LLM‘s might increase elm adoption because it is the ideal language for an LLM right now Yes but no? It really just depends on the amount of elm in the training data and rlhf. I agree that structured frameworks/languages have codebases more similar to one another and that would ease generation. But that alone won't work and usually dev adoption is a total discourse per se

[deleted]

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#93

Post by adamwk »

I can’t think of a worse announcement for your road to 1.0. Who cares? Without localization or accessibility support, it doesn’t make sense to call your UI framework production ready with a 1.0 version. I think limiting what third-party contributors can bridge from browser APIs killed Elm’s momentum for anything but toy projects. It now seems more like a sandbox for Evan to play around with compiler ideas than something meant for production use.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#94

Post by rapind »

rupertlssmith wrote: post #72
rapind wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's improved, but I was very disappointed to find agents constantly tripping over significant white space with Elm (Claude Code). Always struck me as strange since they are very proficient with python... and Elm has been one of the most stable modern languages (so stable that people complain about it never changing!). I think the last time I tried was a year ago though, so I assume it has improved.

LLMs are way past that, Claude Code can very competently write Elm code now, for example.

Good to know. I built https://github.com/pairshaped/hypertea to get some of Elm's safety in typescript while being easy for LLMs to use (this is basically just hyperapp in TS, with added elm-like guardrails). Maybe I'll go back to Elm now that LLMs are handling it better.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#95

Post by goosejuice »

bbkane wrote: post #54

I think of Elm more as an incredibly influential research language these days. It's very focused, there's no public roadmap or official support and the leadership (which is far as I can tell is just Evan) is uninterested in most (any?) community building or core team building. But MAN is it nice to work in. This has resulted in several forks/spin-offs. At the recent Gleam conference, Louis Pilfold joked that every El…

I think because it's so nice, that's why people are disappointed in it's stagnation. But the stagnation is partly why it's so nice!

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#96

Post by AnatolySkuba »

whichdan wrote: post #4

There'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.

[flagged]

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#97

Post by crote »

adastra22 wrote: post #77
Aurornis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then the author just kind of disappeared and the project stalled. There was more to the story than that. They made some major breaking changes in v0.19 that broke a lot of apps and left no path for them to continue with Elm, then dug their heels in when the community protested. If you had an app at your company that used the features they decided not to allow any more, you either had to start deciding which fork to…

What feature is that?

On top of the already-mentioned JS interop breakage, Elm 0.19 also dropped native Websocket support[0]. The API had issues (fair), so it was dropped rather than improving it due to wanting to do it perfectly (okay, I guess), buuut due to the JS interop restrictions this meant that 3rd-party experiments or alternatives were impossible (??), which meant that any use of Websockets was in practice now completely impossible! If I recall correctly something similar happened to other core libraries.

This "nobody is allowed to do this until Evan himself has made time to come up with a blessed solution" style of development left a lot of people quite disappointed. Elm was marketed quite heavily as the best thing since sliced bread and the future of front-end web development, but in reality it turned out to be just Evan's toy language which you could look at but weren't allowed to touch. Which is of course allowed, but it does rapidly kill any kind of community around it.

[0]: https://github.com/elm-lang/websocket

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#98

Post by goosejuice »

Aurornis wrote: post #52
asgr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

your definition of dead is elms definition of stability, I think :D haha javascriptland really warps peoples minds on stability and project-liveness

> your definition of dead is elms definition of stability, I think :D haha The Elm community (or those who remained anyway) has a very cult-like way of spinning the current status quo as being good for you, even if it’s not. Removing native JavaScript interop in 0.19? They’re just making it more pure! Sorry your project had to become impossible to continue on Elm, but this is the price we pay for a leader with vision…

Were people forced to use elm prior to a 1.0 release or something? Is Evan being accused of baiting people with a lovely experience and then bailing? I'm not really familiar, so maybe the ball was dropped in some kind of contract I'm not aware of.

If not, the expectations you and many have here seem pretty unreasonable. There's room for projects like Elm. Not every PL has to meet the demands of every single non paying user of the community.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#99

Post by crote »

adamwk wrote: post #93

I can’t think of a worse announcement for your road to 1.0. Who cares? Without localization or accessibility support, it doesn’t make sense to call your UI framework production ready with a 1.0 version. I think limiting what third-party contributors can bridge from browser APIs killed Elm’s momentum for anything but toy projects. It now seems more like a sandbox for Evan to play around with compiler ideas than someth…

On the one hand, it's good to see Evan's doing fine. He has some pretty good ideas about language development, and Elm has inspired quite a bunch of very interesting projects.

On the other hand, seven hears of absolutely nothing, then a small compiler performance bump, and calling it the "road to 1.0"? No offense, but why bother? She's dead, we've grieved, and we've long since moved on. Until there's something genuinely mindblowing to release, I don't think many people are going to care.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#100

Post by song_synth »

Any insight on comparing Elm to Yew?

I once wrote a frontend webapp with Elm. And with backend server in Clojure, it made as much sense as Elm five years ago, right? :)

For the past two years I've instead used Yew, a rust crate for building UIs. It can look like react or like Elm, it's up to you for how you yews it ;0)

My latest app uses The Elm Architecture in Yew. It has been fantastic.

I think the biggest benefit Elm has over Yew is its access to the node js ecosystem through Port. You can interface with any npm package if you (or your AI) can write a port for it.

So far my best integration with yew dev has been using inline script tags (eek!) where I have to inject some external JS.

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