151–160 of 192 posts
0.19.2 Faster builds, and the Road to Elm 1.0 Jul 2026
0.19.1 Friendly syntax hints, faster builds Oct 2019
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> 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…
Obviously not, but for a short while it felt like Elm evangelization was everywhere.
Ironically, the small group pushing it so hard at the company I was with at the time were arguing that it was very stable and production ready, despite being pre-1.0.
That argument switched for the 0.19 release, when it was argued that it was still early and changing a lot.
The argument switched again when they didn't make any progress for 7 years, which was supposed to be a sign that it was highly stable and mature.
> There's room for projects like Elm. Not every PL has to meet the demands of every single non paying user of the community.
Fully agree, but there's also room for opinions of people using the project. When a project encourages adoption and then pulls the rug out from under actual users, it's also okay for those users to be upset.
That's one thing the Elm project disagreed with. They had drama where even contributors were being handed 7-day bans for innocuous things like talking about native modules after the decision had been made to move away from them. Their subreddit was the kind of place ruled with an iron fist where any post that wasn't completely Elm-positive would be disappeared. There wasn't any room for disagreement in the Elm community and it partially collapsed on them when they pushed it too far.
We had some big Elm proponents who were trying hard to convince the company to use Elm, including doing proof of concept buildouts in Elm. Then the 0.18 to 0.19 Elm drama happened: The core team restricted the ability for users to do any native JavaScript interop, which broke every Elm app that needed any functionality that wasn’t in the core library. It split the Elm fans into two groups: Those who were upset that t…
It's amazing that business would tolerate paying staff to build products on one person's prototype hobby language.
But you're missing the vibe at the time: You would get downvoted and argued with if you tried to say that it was one person's hobby language. It was supposed to be a big movement and the next big thing in FE development. People would argue that it was production ready.
You can even see a lot of those comments in this thread.
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I'm not mad, I'm disappointed . Elm was quite promising prior to this, but 0.19 essentially killed it. And the problem isn't just that sync interop was removed. That would've been fine . It's the double-whammy of 1) killing sync interop, 2) making async interop libs impossible, 3) still allowing it for "blessed" libraries, and 4) gaslighting everyone else that they were Holding It Wrong. Breakage is totally fine, I n…
Don't fret it. Many of us were in the same boat. Evan can do whatever he wants, but we can also call it out when it's wrong. I personally made the same decision. It became very clear to me that Elm was not the foundation for me to build a business on.
IIRC you couldn't, and would be banned on any channels for questioning decisions
Oh 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’ve been using Elm professionally at a very profitable, lean company the last two years. (Didn’t know it coming in, but had enough React, Redux, and other experience to learn quickly.) The Elm community would call this a feature. How much React code you wrote 6-8 years ago will work perfectly and identically with today’s React toolchain? It’s a whole different set of values. Good React code in 2026 looks like any co…
Almost all of it? Meanwhile Elm had extremely painful "Evan knows best" breaking changes that all but killed it and any momentum it once had
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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 impossib…
Elm was better without custom kernel modules and sync JS-interop. It kept the Elm kernel small and portable. It forced the 3rd party package eco system to innovate and create things rather than just wrap existing Javscript libraries. It has enable me to port the small kernel now to C++ for an Elm to native compiler. Also, if you really wanted to bypass it and have your own kernel, that was always possible and not har…
That may be true, but what would have been even better is never having the feature, as opposed to adding it, allowing many people to become dependent on it, and then taking it away. (Like everyone else, I'm not claiming Evan should not be able to make such changes -- just that making such changes will breed predictable resentment.)
> It kept the Elm kernel small and portable.
This is a good thing.
> It forced the 3rd party package eco system to innovate and create things rather than just wrap existing Javscript libraries.
This is a bad thing, presented as a good thing. Boring as it may be, if wrapping an existing piece of working code does the job with no downsides then it's always better to do that than reimplement it for reimplementation's sake.
I hope to see progress in the future. I loved Elm and it made me a better programmer. Things changed a lot since then, but beauty of Elm is not matched by any language. Also, if you ever had to refactor anything, there is no language in the world that makes it as easy to change things. Hope to see more releases in the future.
You should try more languages
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…
For whatever it's worth, I've found Gren to be a very capable successor with an active and helpful community.