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Why I'm Leaving Elm (2020)

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Re: Why I'm Leaving Elm (2020)

#21

Post by azangru »

tikhonj wrote: post #13
cyberax wrote: post #12

Elm is pretty much dead at this point. The last substantial commits in the Elm repositories are about 2 years old. I liked Elm before, and was a great fit for internal corporate applications. Something like an admin control panel or a monitoring tool. Are there any similar projects that are in the "more alive" state?

PureScript[1][2] seems pretty alive these days. From my relatively small, self-contained experiments, it's a lot more flexible and expressive than Elm at the expense of (maybe?) being a bit harder to learn up-front. [1]: https://www.purescript.org/ [2]: https://github.com/purescript/purescript

How has it been going for Purescript since its creator and maintainer Phil Freeman stepped down?

Re: Why I'm Leaving Elm (2020)

#22

Post by azangru »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #14
cameronfraser wrote: post #4

why do these elm hit pieces keep getting dug up and reposted? It's almost always in response to some other elm post (there was one yesterday). People use elm in production at quite a few companies without worrying too much about the concerns laid out in the article, but it feels like people seem almost fervent in their need to justify their reason for leaving elm and why other people shouldn't use elm.

HN can’t resist crapping on Elm and Tailwind. I wonder what the other popular hate topics are?

React?

Re: Why I'm Leaving Elm (2020)

#23

Post by FrustratedMonky »

ELM is great. So where do people go if they like ELM and want that type of thing, but sustained?

If everyone is leaving all languages, based on the flurry of these types of posts, what is left? What language/platform do we use, if everyone is leaving everything because of some X?

Sounds like open source is fragmenting. And what will we be left with? The big corp backed platforms, that have marketing departments, and product managers, and support departments. .Net, Java, etc...

Re: Why I'm Leaving Elm (2020)

#26

Post by AlexITC »

cyberax wrote: post #12

Elm is pretty much dead at this point. The last substantial commits in the Elm repositories are about 2 years old. I liked Elm before, and was a great fit for internal corporate applications. Something like an admin control panel or a monitoring tool. Are there any similar projects that are in the "more alive" state?

It's worth sharing Scala.js which has https://github.com/PurpleKingdomGames/tyrian, an ELM-insired library for the UI.

Re: Why I'm Leaving Elm (2020)

#28

Post by not_a_shill »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #23

ELM is great. So where do people go if they like ELM and want that type of thing, but sustained? If everyone is leaving all languages, based on the flurry of these types of posts, what is left? What language/platform do we use, if everyone is leaving everything because of some X? Sounds like open source is fragmenting. And what will we be left with? The big corp backed platforms, that have marketing departments, and…

Calm down, none of what you're saying has any basis in reality.

You can still use elm all you want, you just won't get paid for it by a corporation. You seem to not want corporate backing, so you should be okay with that.

Alternatively there are other languages/platforms out there other than ".Net, Java" you can use.

Re: Why I'm Leaving Elm (2020)

#29

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

I'm moving away from working with Elm also, but for different reasons.

I don't care that Elm isn't some jolly club where everyone gets to join in. If it were, we would 100% see escape hatches, and, ultimately, runtime errors.

I also don't care that it doesn't have typeclasses or other more powerful language features. The fact that the language is small is a feature. It's much more thoughtfully designed than JavaScript (which is now worse than it was 10 years ago as it has continued to accrete features it envied from other languages).

I think Elm is the best technology in its space. If I wanted to build a single page application, I would absolutely, 100%, write it in Elm.

I'm moving away from working with Elm because I just don't need to write single page applications, and I believe developers are all too eager to write single page applications unnecessarily.

Re: Why I'm Leaving Elm (2020)

#30

Post by hinkley »

NeuroCoder wrote: post #10
jb1991 wrote: post #8

Ah, another “why I’m leaving X” post, I’ve never seen these kinds of posts as particularly fruitful regardless of the language they go on about. Engineers can assess the pros and cons of a technology for themselves based on their needs, and usually these kinds of posts don’t have the relevance their authors wish they would. I think they serve more as emotional catharsis (or worse) than actually meaningful content (mo…

This sort of feedback is just difficult for people to consume in a mature way. Many get defensive or weaponize it. Language design is hard to critique since it becomes so abstract making most comments superficial. But people in this situation often have some actual knowledge. The other situation is when the language devs actually listen to some of the feedback.

Language design is really goddamned hard and if you’re really good at it, you’re rewarded with a fan base that won’t give you permission to do it again for another ten or fifteen years.
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