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Why I’m Leaving Elm

lukeplant.me.uk

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Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#321

Post by carapace »

dnautics wrote: post #110
whelming_wave wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would they do? I'm not sure there's an actual threat to follow through on. They can't block a forked compiler from, for example, using official packages without close-sourcing their own compiler (to prevent it from bringing in whatever change makes it work again). At that point, why bother respecting the threat? A forked compiler isn't going to get maintainers? A package depending on the forked compiler isn't go…

It's still worth knowing that they're being jerks about it, since that falls outside of the social (but obviously not the legal) aspects of open source.

> falls outside of the social (but obviously not the legal) aspects of open source.

Not really, IMO. Forking a project used to be a really aggressive thing to do back before GitHub made it so common among younger waves of developers.

If you go to Evan and say, "Look, I want to use your thing but do it my way." and he says "No, I have a clear vision of what the thing is and it's not that. KTHXBYE." I don't think that's "being a jerk".

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#322

Post by dorian-graph »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #267
erichocean wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I used elixir for the backend and its paid off in dividends. That said, I had a year of experience working with it so it was boring technology for me at that point.

I think there may be a difference between less common and novelty, otherwise we'd all be using Java.

Elixir (Erlang) has been around for a while and I would venture that the could be considered a little boring.

It's like functional programming. It's been around for a long time and it's safe to use, but some people would call it exotic and be afraid. It's less common, but not exactly novel.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#323

Post by dorian-graph »

popara wrote: post #269

When I decided to commit my project to Elm, back in 2017, I have seen all those writings on the wall. Basically I am buying in someone's whim. One caveat is that I can stop following his whim, freeze source code that I need and carry on my development with out needing or caring about future releases, ie, I do the dreadful fork. I work alone so I choose my tech destiny. But when you look at the guy at which will you a…

> Luke is off and rude in this post at least.

I found him humble, self-aware, forgiving, and kind

> Why Luke didn't came up with big blog post about the features he would like to see in Elm? Much more constructive than bitching about it.

I think you may have missed one of, if not the, fundamental point of the post. Even if he did (which he did at times), it would've been pointless.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#324

Post by [deleted] »

lolc wrote: post #165
hombre_fatal wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That came over to me as "you are obliged to do a lot more work that I want you to do, on your own time and personal cost, and to stop developing the project according to your own vision or you are a bad person". I mention this in my top-level comment, but here's Rich Hickey of Clojure responding to similar assertions: https://old.reddit.com/r/Clojure/comments/73yznc/on_whose_au... > Clojure was not originally prima…

Let's take Java as a point of reference, since you brought it up. Imagine the JDK were opinionated about which authors were allowed to write packages that use FFI. And people wanting to use it would be instructed to build a relationship to said authors to get their code blessed to use FFI. It is wholly inconceivable. I'm sure you'd see quite a few "Leaving Java" posts over it.

[deleted]

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#325

Post by tobyhede »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #297
tobyhede wrote: post #266

I find it fascinating that the author is leaving one fringe language with a small community for another fringe language with a small community- in this case Bucklescript. I've never found the productivity benefits of these JS alternatives worth the risk and cost. There is an understandable desire to move away from the messy reality of JS and it's browser friends, I get it. Having written many thousands of lines of Co…

The upsides make more sense if your Webpack/JS tool chain was growing out of hand. For example, once you take on Typescript, you take on quite a bit of idiosyncrasies. And your Webpack config may grow pretty large over time. We have some hacks in our Webpack config just to avoid some thing like double ESLint/TS evaluation. And it all can start to feel quite precarious. We even found bugs in Webpack's circular depende…

I agree that opionated frameworks can reduce complexity. I was Rails for a very long time.

But moving to a new language that you can't hire for seems like an extreme reaction to "our config is complex". One good thing about a mainline technology like TS is that thinga get attention. Manual config today may be supported feature in the future.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#327

Post by throwaway17_17 »

I don’t use Elm. But I have watched several of the founder’s talks about different subjects. That is to say, I have a half decent idea as to what the ‘native modules’ issue means. I think Luke’s issue is that under the newest release Elm is requiring that no code contain any ‘raw’ JS or it won’t compile. It seems like this was an option prior to the current version so is this basically like if the Rust team said as of the new release no code, other than that code coming from the Rust team may use ‘unsafe’?

— This is an honest question I’ve been holding in all afternoon, and seeing this still on the front page, I just decided to ask.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#328

Post by EdwardDiego »

popara wrote: post #269

When I decided to commit my project to Elm, back in 2017, I have seen all those writings on the wall. Basically I am buying in someone's whim. One caveat is that I can stop following his whim, freeze source code that I need and carry on my development with out needing or caring about future releases, ie, I do the dreadful fork. I work alone so I choose my tech destiny. But when you look at the guy at which will you a…

> And language is simple, my wife started writing it

...not sure what you're implying about your wife there.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#329

Post by okareaman »

I knew nothing about Elm or Luke or Evan before this, but I'm always curious about social relationships in the developer community. That said, I read Luke's article, then watched Evan's video "What is Success?" then I went back and read a couple more of Luke's articles. I am reminded of "Scala War Stories with Paul Phillips," which to me is kind of a classic of the genre of a great developer with huge passion and incredible work ethic almost driven to a nervous breakdown. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1wrWQcqLpo I was really impressed with Evan's thought process. I liked his thoughts and feelings about design simplicity and getting it right. I was also really impressed with Luke. He has a practical bent I appreciate and was really excited about his i18n solution, rightly so...and then the clash... I'm really sad about this. There are no winners here. No one is wrong. It's a loss all around. I'm sorry.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#330

Post by frozenlettuce »

Besides being much more elegant, Elm's tooling is very limited when compared to JavaScript and React. When working with the js+react+redux combo, you have access to specialized browser extensions that allow exploring the application structure and events. It's sad because the language precedes Redux, but the centralization from its owner made it lose the boat. The fact that the Elm blog has a new post only once a year does not help, either.
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