Why I’m Leaving Elm • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#411

Post by kazinator » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 7:35 PM UTC

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #166

btilly wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. But "if they all got together" is waving away the difficulty of getting them all together, cooperating, and working together. Open source projects are a lot more difficult to run than you might expect.

> Open source projects are a lot more difficult to run than you might expect. Indeed. You pour thousands of hours of work into something and give it to the world for free, only to be met by “give us synchronous IO or we will throw our toys out of the pram!”

That specific example would just be laughable. "I gave you awesome asynchronous I/O; just write the five lines of code around a semaphore if you want it synchronous."

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#412

Post by skybrian » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 8:08 PM UTC

ghayes wrote: post #305

ngrilly wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the post and I don't see the same behaviour in the Go community (the core team banning people who express disagreement or fork the compiler).

There are a ton of Go features that have been asked for by the community that have taken years to get mainlined. I think the most common examples are generics and package management. The authors of the language tended, at points, to be at odds with the desires of many in the community.

Even in those areas, however, Go hasn't done the things that Elm did (according to this article).

There have been a lot of experiments with Go package management, and some did get fairly widespread adoption. After many years, they are getting replaced with an official way, and there are some hard feelings, but experimentation and adoption of alternate solutions was never forbidden. Even with the official system, you aren't locked into the official package management infrastructure; there are flags and environmental variables you can set to use your own servers.

There have also been a lot of experiments with Go generics, often implemented via a preprocessor. I don't think any of these got a lot of traction, but again, they weren't forbidden.

Ultimately, the Go team decides based on what they think is right, but at the same time they aren't so insecure about competition that they need to suppress it.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#413

Post by doorbellpan » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 8:55 PM UTC

i am not familiar with elm, but openbsd has similar issues. unless you do everything perfect from the outset and make friends with theo himself or a core person you are pretty hosed. even then they can berate anyone and everyone however they seem fit, but if you speak out you get personally attacked. they care about themselves over users and cannot even follow their own rules along with using old technology to manage the contributing process making it cumbersome and sometimes not worth the time of new people to try and work with. i know people who gave up even trying after about a year to 18 months for these reasons and they wont even go near the os on a server anymore

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#414

Post by ngrilly » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 9:17 PM UTC

ghayes wrote: post #305

ngrilly wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the post and I don't see the same behaviour in the Go community (the core team banning people who express disagreement or fork the compiler).

There are a ton of Go features that have been asked for by the community that have taken years to get mainlined. I think the most common examples are generics and package management. The authors of the language tended, at points, to be at odds with the desires of many in the community.

Maybe, but the Go authors never banned people expressing disagreement or people forking the compiler or the tools.

Almost all programming languages have features being asked by the community and not available as soon as one would hope. Modules in C++. Value types in Java. Removing the GIL in Python. Parallelism in OCaml. Higher kinded types in Rust. Etc.

And most of the time there are pros and cons to adding these features or not, which sometimes evolve in a debate fracturing the community. It even happened to the otherwise peaceful Python community with Guido quitting after the decision of assignment expression: “Now that PEP 572 is done, I don’t ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions.”

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#415

Post by dimator » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

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…

the point is not leaving, the point is that he cares (enough) about Elm to try to ring the alarm that its leadership is bad and needs to change.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#416

Post by emerongi » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

gdotdesign wrote: post #400

I've invested a lot of time in Elm about two-to-three years ago, the two main things was elm-ui [1] and elm-github-install [2]. At the time elm-ui was impossible to build without "native code" so I used it and built elm-github-install to make it work. Suffice to say, I've run into the exact same issues as the author. Had they allowed me to contribute in a meaningful way Elm now would have a nice UI library and probab…

Mint looks cool!

Maybe this is answered somewhere, but what would you say is the differentiator between Mint and Svelte? Many of the design choices seem similar. I am in the position of starting a new hobby project soon myself and currently Svelte is the one I have landed on.

Thank you for your efforts.

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#417

Post by anthonybullard » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 10:04 PM UTC

palerdot wrote: post #408

anthonybullard wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have met both Evan and Richard, having been a member of the SF Elm Meetup group. My experiences have shown me that they are both deeply empathetic individuals who are very methodical in their approach to improving the language. Evan spends every Meetup exclusively focused on attendees who've no it's very little experience with the language, basically giving them a personal guided tour. In these sessions here is ver…

> But in their eyes, Elm is not done I think this is one of the major themes of all the 'Elm dramas' that we have been reading and hearing about. Elm core team should stop recommending it as a stable platform that people can try out (which Elm clearly is not).

I've personally never seem them say "the language is done, you can expect no breaking changes". Hence the fact that it is v0.19

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#418

Post by sbarre » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 10:39 PM UTC

gowld wrote: post #315

sbarre wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the OP, but I can think of a few reasons: * security patches * browser compatibility changes * build tooling compatibility (unless you pin that too, but that never works for long)

HN doesn't support markdown for lists.

Yes I know, that's why I indented it

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#419

Post by nathanasmith » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 10:56 PM UTC

amw-zero wrote: post #375

AlexCoventry wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's quite charming in person, FWIW, and he has great language design sensibility.

Sounds like that’s a complete facade though. Plenty of people are overly polite because it inflates their ego to be perceived as polite. And the article isn’t talking about politeness so much as openness. Which, the Elm team seems very very closed off.

>Plenty of people are overly polite because it inflates their ego to be perceived as polite.

Can you point me to some article or rigorous paper that would help me take this claim seriously?

Re: Why I’m Leaving Elm

#420

Post by lmm » Fri, Apr 10, 2020, 11:07 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #410

lmm wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you ever try Scala.js? I was a huge fan of how fully it was just standard Scala and therefore well-supported by IntelliJ; I've not seen any other compile-to-JS language match that level of IDE experience (but as someone who was already a Scala fan I'm biased).

A bit of an open door maybe, but TypeScript has that level of IDE experience too.

It didn't when I tried it - IntelliJ does support it on some level, but doesn't offer the same depth of automatic refactoring etc. that you get with Scala, to the point that my colleagues generally favoured using VS Code.