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Road to Elm 1.0

elm-lang.org

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Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#161

Post by nsonha »

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…

I've just stated working around that time when the cult was active. And I think that is the correct term for it because other languages that have been praised to the same level (ruby, rust, haskell) actually have things to show for and not just simplistic functional programming

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#162

Post by bmurphy1976 »

troupo wrote: post #154
bmurphy1976 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Evan can do whatever he wants, but we can also call it out when it's wrong. IIRC you couldn't, and would be banned on any channels for questioning decisions

We've been calling him out for YEARS. Half the comments on this article are people calling him out. He can't escape it.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#163

Post by crote »

abrookewood wrote: post #151

Am I right in thinking that Elm has lost a lot of momentum? It is barely discussed on HN anymore and I wonder if the releases/news have a lot to do with it. Look at the time between releases: 0.19.2 Faster builds, and the Road to Elm 1.0 Jul 2026 0.19.1 Friendly syntax hints, faster builds Oct 2019

There's very little left to discuss, unfortunately. The 0.19 release included some extremely controversial changes. The core Elm team responded by killing all discussion of it and (to the outside world) abandoning the project, the Elm community responded by scattering to a dozen forks and reimplementations of The Elm Architecture.

Everything which could've been said has been said a dozen times already. People have moved on, and Elm is mostly remembered as one of the web's greatest front-end could-have-beens.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#164

Post by davidgtonge »

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 agree and I think the ideas in Elm are applicable in many other contexts. Adopting a new language is just hard, especially with larger teams. I ended up taking some of the ideas of Elm but implementing with Rust and TS - https://dave.tonge.org/articles/make-ts-boring/

The basic idea - all application state and view model creation is in Rust (compiled to Wasm). I'm using Rust not really for performance, but for its strong type system. Components are in TS but have a strict contract they can only accept plain input props and output events. Rust processes the events and ships a view model patch to TS.

This is not "Elm in Rust/TS" but it is definitely Elm inspired.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#165

Post by hollowturtle »

fpoling wrote: post #143
hollowturtle wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can keep failing til you're tired of having the agent running in loops, as I said it doesn't matter, agent tools are more effective with models trained with a lot of elm examples

Yet Elm due to its simplicity does not need a lot of examples. Language itself is small and blessed way to architecture things consist of few patterns. Then things are composable. This is ideal for LLMs. The price for that is verbosity. What in other languages are hidden behind async and complicated libraries in Elm has to be done explicitly resulting in boilerplate. But that is never a problem for LLMs. Then Elm com…

> Yet Elm due to its simplicity does not need a lot of examples

But does the neural net ;)

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#166

Post by discardable_dan »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #107
crote wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This really overstates the problem and situation. Synchronous interop was removed from Elm. That sucks for synchronous stuff and anything too trivial to be worth async interop. But async interop is still available. Anything networked, like websockets, is a natural fit for async interop. i.e. a Send(Req) | Recv(Res) port. It's fine to be mad that a "BDFL" decided on a different set of trade-offs than your preference,…

I think you are taking the wrong lesson. The lesson is not "things make break." Many languages break things. Haskell has made it a feature, not a bug.

But this change did more than break things. It meant people using Elm in production had to abandon it, nearly immediately, as all future work would first require them to port the whole stack, in one fell swoop, to Elm (and this was before tail recursion modulo cons was implemented, but recursion was forced).

Imagine if, in Rust's infancy, it decided to remove the C FFI with the argument that people should instead, naturally, rewrite that code in Rust. What would have happened? People would have abandoned it in droves, and it would have been essentially relegated to a research language, never again suited for prime time.

And -- oh, look what happened to Elm!

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#168

Post by mmmmbbbhb »

podnami wrote: post #3

What is the point of actively choosing a web framework in the age of LLMs?

I am also confused by this, and not just for web, but any dev technology. I personally couldn't care less what the llm is writing in.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#169

Post by int_19h »

rupertlssmith wrote: post #146
crote wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It doesn't matter how good a language is in theory if people using it for practical purposes end up having to abandon it.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#170

Post by int_19h »

gdcbe wrote: post #114
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.

These days, though, why not just use Haskell itself? Upstream ghc cancompile to wasm for several major releases now and there are several actively developed web frameworks, some of them very Elm-inspired, e.g. https://haskell-miso.org
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