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Road to Elm 1.0

elm-lang.org

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Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#111

Post by kubb »

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…

I say let him cook. The real ones will know when it's good and ready, and hype driven folks can't be saved anyway.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#112

Post by zdragnar »

goosejuice wrote: post #98
Aurornis wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 payin…

Elm was very heavily evangelized for a while, and people were using it. Had there been a migration path through the breaking changes, it would have been a lot less disruptive.

Even if there had just been incremental bug fixes, I suspect between some and most people would have gotten over it, but seven years of silence is a very long time- long enough for an entire generation of new developers to start calling themselves seniors knowing only that Elm has stalled and shouldn't be used, because the controlling developers are unreliable and prone to giving the appearance of abandoning the language.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#114

Post by gdcbe »

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…

The nicest thing of Elm is how much it feels like Haskell. Have built some fun things with Elm years ago.

The second nicest thing with Elm is the philosophy of if it compiles it works. And to be honest you can get that same feeling with most of Rust as well. Sadly not as much of a haskell feeling but at least it has a warm shadow of some of its functional ancestors.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#115

Post by threethirtytwo »

sesm wrote: post #27
dzonga wrote: post #6

used 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.

You really need to use it to see the light. It's like reading about programming and actually programming. You don't understand programming until you actually program.

You won't understand why elm is simple until you actually use elm to the point of internal understanding. I think doing this is much harder nowadays given that most people would likely use an LLM to do most of the coding.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#116

Post by alphanumeric0 »

I worked on an Elm project professionally for a few years, and I just finished upgrading an old React app to version 19 on my own, which took a greater part of a year.

I can appreciate even more now why Elm is so opinionated. As much as Elm is a unique technical, research language, it is a huge cultural change, and I think that is why so many people left. Allowing libraries to be thin wrapper over ports is one example that goes completely against the Elm philosophy.

I'm happy to see Elm is still around, and I hope one day people will see more value in it.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#117

Post by 1-more »

sheept wrote: post #84
auslegung wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Longstanding issues that prevent usage? Not for me and the projects I’ve been apart of. No doubt there are plenty of reported issues, and no doubt they truly negatively impact some users, but I would still much rather choose the usability and stability of Elm 0.19.1-2 than anything in the typescript ecosystem today

When I worked on an Elm app in 2020, my users reported compatibility issues with various browser extensions (e.g. Grammarly, 1Password). I personally would prioritize making my apps usable for my users over making the DX usable for myself, so I stopped using Elm for future projects.

Oh yeah those are a bear: grammarly, 1password, and darkreader were the big ones, but translation was too. Elm assumes it's the only thing modifying the DOM underneath its root element; the extensions assume the DOM is free to be manipulated. NRI did a writeup on how they fixed it. https://blog.noredink.com/post/800011916366020608/adopting-e... The TLDR is to use https://github.com/lydell/elm-safe-virtual-dom/

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#118

Post by whichdan »

auslegung wrote: post #16
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.

Stability. It works. Frequent breaking changes to core functionality of your tech stack is not a feature, it’s a bug.

I agree that the stability is quite nice. But there are plenty of areas where the language could use some improvement - for instance, the ergonomics around writing nested Single Page Apps is pretty cumbersome.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#120

Post by zoul »

alphanumeric0 wrote: post #116

I worked on an Elm project professionally for a few years, and I just finished upgrading an old React app to version 19 on my own, which took a greater part of a year. I can appreciate even more now why Elm is so opinionated. As much as Elm is a unique technical, research language, it is a huge cultural change , and I think that is why so many people left. Allowing libraries to be thin wrapper over ports is one examp…

For me the problem wasn’t the cultural change, it was depending on language whose leadership doesn’t seem to give a fuck about real-world problems the language users face in production. And then being constantly gaslighted about it on the official channels like the language forum.
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