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Why I’m Leaving Elm

lukeplant.me.uk

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Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#221

Post by diggan »

lolc wrote: post #195
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 find you're being needlessly formalistic here. The author is explaining where they are coming from. What their understanding and expectations in the open-source world are. This helps to understand their position. That initial part was intended (I guess) to make comments like yours redundant. Because that way we can understand what the author means without guessing about their usage of the term. The article does not…

> What their understanding and expectations in the open-source world are

Thanks for putting it like that, it's completely true and I agree. Many people have an understanding and expectation of Open Source that not even the definition of Open Source agrees with (https://opensource.org/osd), which is contributing to this problem. That was a bit of the point of my comment.

The article doesn't require anything, but in general, most people see OSI as the organization who stewards a lot of things around in the Open Source world. If people cannot even agree about the definition of Open Source, we're in for a real treat now when companies start to abuse it.

> You can say that you use a more restricted definition, and that is it.

Again, I'm not going by my own vision of Open Source (as the article's author does), I go by the Open Source Initiative's definition of open source, which again, you can read here: https://opensource.org/osd

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#222

Post by ghthor »

I'd be interested to see why the author would be unable to use the ports interface to work with the API of his package.

My understanding about why the core team is being so controlling over the native modules access is that they're trying to prove that each native module is pure, so they can make assumptions and declarations in the compiler that the code produced is pure. By forcing unblessed/unreviewed modules to use the ports interface they can maintain this assumption. Without doing this you lose all of that assumption and your compiler falls apart, if it's based on that assumption.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#223

Post by fbonetti »

canadaduane wrote: post #30

Has anyone started a full fork of the compiler and ecosystem? It seems like the size of the pool of the "Elm disaffected" is large enough by now that a fork of the entire project might be worthwhile. I imagine there are a lot of software engineers (like me) who at one time used Elm, but lost interest under the leadership of the core team.

I think people have already taken the good parts of Elm and implemented those ideas in other frameworks. Redux was inspired by the Elm, for example. I personally like using React, Redux, and Typescript. It's nowhere near the purity of Elm, but it's good enough.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#224

Post by felipelemos »

ar_lan wrote: post #194
SrslyJosh wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't say the word "guys" in the Slack channel, or a bot will come and correct you, and tell you to say "folks" instead. Being asked to use inclusive language is a weird thing to complain about, especially as the very first example you give. > And from then on, you'll notice the core team all use the word "folks" incessantly in their writing, it's like some weird cult. I use "folks" and other non-gendered langu…

I think it depends about messaging. There's one aspect to saying "Hey, we are trying to be ultra-inclusive, and there have been members in this group that feel offended or excluded via the term "guys". To make everyone feel welcome, we ask you refrain from "guys" and use the more inclusive "folks", instead.". vs "'Guys' is a non-inclusive and harmful term. Please consider using 'folks' instead." I don't know how the…

If you don't have a choice, in the end makes no difference, and the first option can come as passive aggressive.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#225

Post by mcherm »

serf wrote: post #173
SrslyJosh wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't say the word "guys" in the Slack channel, or a bot will come and correct you, and tell you to say "folks" instead. Being asked to use inclusive language is a weird thing to complain about, especially as the very first example you give. > And from then on, you'll notice the core team all use the word "folks" incessantly in their writing, it's like some weird cult. I use "folks" and other non-gendered langu…

>Being asked to use inclusive language is a weird thing to complain about that is, if you consider the word 'guys' as gender bound and inclusive. Female friends with myself in attendance are often referred to as 'Guys' by waitresses, waiters, and serving staff nearly anywhere I've gone. A former roommate who worked as a server at a restaurant used the word non-inclusively with the same meaning as 'Folks'. So, first g…

> >Being asked to use inclusive language is a weird thing to

> that is, if you consider the word 'guys' as gender bound and inclusive.

I think you might be overlooking another possibility. The same reasoning applies if you believe that SOME OF YOUR AUDIENCE considers the word "guys" to be gender-bound. If that is true, then a reasonable person might decide that for the sake of that audience it might be polite to use a different term even if that reasonable person doesn't ascribe any gender to the term.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#226

Post by tmcw »

I've used Elm on a few projects - most recently oldfashioned.tech - and it's a lovely language. I read this article expecting the word 'ethical' to eventually point to something and it never did.

The author wanted a different language, shouted at a bunch of people for not agreeing with him, those people correctly wrote him off as a productive member of the community, and then he wrote a long blog post about how he can't see their side of the argument.

Indeed, he should use a language that aligns with his preferences. Extrapolating from his experience into this right vs. wrong narrative doesn't actually work.

Even after his explicitly acknowledged troll-like behavior, he didn't get some expletive-laden response from the project maintainers. He wasn't banned from the repos. At no point does he substantiate the idea of the leadership style being 'threatening.'

On the other hand, there are plenty of communities with actual threatening, abusive behavior in plain view, that everyone's aware of. There are plenty of communities that "well actually" every forum post instead of being helpful. Elm isn't one of those.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#227

Post by geocar »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #53

These posts (and HN comments) really make me wonder if adopters of fringe languages are always going to be thin-skinned developers who get emotional when they realize they won't be part of the language's design decisions. That "On Whose Authority" rant about Clojure complains about the exact same things. And I'll refer to Rich Hickey's response: https://old.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/73yznc/on_whose_au... . Elm in…

It's a peculiar demographic I've noticed amongst people who have grown up with all their software available gratis or ad-supported.

"Oh this incredibly hard work that someone else did for free isn't exactly what I wanted and they refuse to change it the way I want for free"

If Elm is so great, and if it's 99% there, and you only need "this one little custom operator" added, or this "special piece of extension code" and it's really that 1% and you can't be bothered to contribute that 1%; to do it yourself, or pay someone to do it, well, then you deserve to use whatever piece of shit you end up with.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#228

Post by sonofaplum »

ghthor wrote: post #222

I'd be interested to see why the author would be unable to use the ports interface to work with the API of his package. My understanding about why the core team is being so controlling over the native modules access is that they're trying to prove that each native module is pure, so they can make assumptions and declarations in the compiler that the code produced is pure. By forcing unblessed/unreviewed modules to us…

The author gives more specifics in the footnotes, specifically footnote #4 https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/#id14

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#229

Post by fbonetti »

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…

Don't use Elm at your startup. It's been dead for a long time. Pick something that has a huge community behind it, like React.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#230

Post by bmurphy1976 »

mrozbarry wrote: post #210

Original author of the elm-firebase ( https://github.com/pairshaped/elm-firebase ) here. While I think Elm certainly has some rough patches in both their aggressively PC community and the immaturity of the language (still many breaking changes, not 1.x, etc.), it's not that awful. I was told that elm-firebase was basically a waste, and don't use native modules, so I stopped development. I didn't need to make a big st…

That's what many people (myself included) have done. Unfortunately by not sharing our experiences, others will have to learn things the hard way.

If Evan is entitled to run Elm however he wants, Luke is entitled to post whatever criticism he wants on his own blog.

If nobody ever speaks up, do you think things will actually ever get better?

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