Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I’m Leaving Elm

lukeplant.me.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 450 posts

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#211

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

jlokier wrote: post #203
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bit about "excommunication" is very explicitly linked to the author's plan to fork Elm. Now, I don't think "excommunication" is necessarily the correct descriptor. The Elm maintainer who made the threat said that he considered making a fork on "attack" on Elm's goals [1], and that the project would not be greeted with open arms. (Although in the original comment it was a little less clear whether it was the proje…

I don't see anything about making a fork in the linked GitHub issue. (The word "fork" appears once elsewhere, in an unrelated context in a different comment.) The thing about open arms is not about forking (or if it is, it's not obvious to me), and reads to me more like "assuming you are not making your own fork, can you please stop pressuring upstream to accomodate designs which are explicitly against our clearly co…

The comment immediately before rtfeldman's references patching the compiler for this project, which is an implied necessity if js code is to continue to be used. It's essentially a soft-fork, and that is what rtfeldman is objecting to.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#212

Post by erichocean »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #118

This came at an awkward time. I just bought Richard Feldman's book "Elm in Action" a few days ago and was working through the first 2 chapters. This has made me reconsider my intention use Elm in my startup. Having features randomly fail on me and having to rewrite an entire library in elm vs calling out to js means less time creating features that matter to my customers! I was drawn to elm as a way of spending less…

> This has made me reconsider my intention use Elm in my startup.

Choose Boring Technology http://boringtechnology.club/

Seriously, don't use up your startup's innovation tokens on some guy's hobby programming language.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#213

Post by Athas »

philh wrote: post #180
hombre_fatal wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This discussion about whether or not the "Elm community" will be meanies is missing the point and inventing a hypothetical scenario where you get kicked out of some club. Kind of a weird conjecture to me. I guarantee nobody truly cares that you fork Elm. The thing is that generally people who threaten to fork Elm are quite hostile on the Elm forums and subreddit. If you fork Elm, an already tiny ecosystem, you'll rea…

> I guarantee nobody truly cares that you fork Elm. One of my coworkers once edited the elm compiler to remove the native code restrictions, and placed it on NPM. Evan emailed him and asked him to take it down. There may be more to the story that I don't know, but from what I know it sounds like Evan does care.

Did he take it down?

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#214

Post by geocar »

save_ferris wrote: post #5

> For example, if there is a bug in any core library, or something missing, you just have to wait for the core team to fix it, rather than being able to fix it yourself. You might need a performance fix, which can be done using Javascript but not in Elm (lack of destructive updates makes some things very hard to implement efficiently), and again you will be stuck having to explain to your boss “I know this is possibl…

> if this is true.

It's as true as it is for Python.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#215

Post by diggan »

btilly wrote: post #87
diggan wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using/contributing to a open source project that is famous for it's non-community development and BDFL leadership style, it should come as no surprise when that continues. The call for "If you're not happy you should fork the code" comes because this is a explicit expectation of the Elm core team and Evan. What does "open source work" really mean? Open Source talks strictly about the licensing and distribut…

If you're using/contributing to a open source project that is famous for it's non-community development and BDFL leadership style, it should come as no surprise when that continues. That's pretty much the central thesis of the article. With detail and examples on exactly what the leadership problem is and why it causes challenges for users. The call for "If you're not happy you should fork the code" comes because thi…

> the leadership problem

It's only a problem for the ones who misunderstand the model. It's not a problem, it's by design. It's explicitly setup so that Evan has the final say in everything.

> What I mean by "work" is that it leads to successful projects. By a variety of metrics for success.

I'm always interested in hearing what metrics people are using for "success", so do please list them so we can be on the same page.

> You have it exactly backwards.

The author is the one using "Open Source" in their article, not "open communities" or "open governance". I understand it can be confusing, but let's not change the meaning of already existing terms.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#217

Post by diggan »

palerdot wrote: post #95
diggan wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. I'm gonna be honest and say I haven't finished the entire article so author might have elaborated further after, but I got a chill when reading the following passage: > The second is that if you advertise something as Open Source, there is a common set of assumptions about what that means, some of which are explicit in accepted definitions of the term. It seems the "common set of assumptions" is around that pe…

> I continued reading and found bunch of more passages where the authors understanding of open source seems to be incorrect. The author is one of the "core team" members of Django[0]. So, it is safe to say that whatever assumptions he has about open source is not a fantasy and cannot be compared line-by-line to a text book definition of open source. [0] - https://lukeplant.me.uk/personal.html

> whatever assumptions he has about open source is not a fantasy

I no way am I going to accept anyone's opinion based on what project they are associated with. If Linus Torvalds says something about open source or free software, I'll read what he says and make my opinion based on what he is saying, not based on that he was the original creator of Linux.

Anything else is just appeal to authority and we would do much better in discussions if we didn't do that.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#218

Post by int_19h »

smoyer wrote: post #157
mercer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brief experience has been similar. Elm is a dictatorship that could be wonderful if it didn't exist in the realm of messy html/js. I experience an icky feeling of stockholm-syndrome part of the time, and just plain frustration at other times when dealing with Elm. What's infuriating is that I do see the benefit of some degree of strict stewardship. It's just that it's too much in this case.

The use of "dictatorship" in your comment brought a smile to my face because I thought of the BDFL title given to Python's creator ... and then imagined the Elm team forgot the "B" at the beginning of the acronym. Note that I have no personal experience with Elm and am in no position to take sides. The comment just describes the mental image I got from your comment's ink blot.

Most dictators believe that they are benevolent, as does their close circle (which is then often seen as "the community", because it has the loudest voice). From the blog, it definitely sounds like this is the case for Elm.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#220

Post by mrgriffin »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #115
markrages wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment. It is called "smart tabs" and good text editors already implement it.

If you use spaces, you can check that files are okay by forbidding \t. If you use tabs, you can check that files are okay by forbidding /^\t* /. If you use tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment, ??????

Forbid "\t* *\t"?
Post reply on HN