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Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)

lukeplant.me.uk

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Re: Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)

#51

Post by ericyd »

casey2 wrote: post #28
cma256 wrote: post #24

Still the best web language and framework ever introduced. Its influence is everywhere. Unfortunately no one implements all of it so they can never live up to the standard it set. I would recommend everyone avoid reading this article. It didn't accomplish anything. In the five years since writing nothing has changed and no alternative replaced it. Elm is not used because the JavaScript community chose something else…

I would recommend people learn the assembly language for the computer they own and then a high level language like c or shell. Far too many developers these days don't know anything about computers. Going into your kitchen and making some food with the ingredients you have will always be, to use a buzzword, more sustainable than ignoring the state of the kitchen and saying make me an omelette, or worse calling up ube…

What a strange non sequitur, for what reasons do you believe learning assembly is worthwhile and how does it relate to this discussion about Elm? Also the food analogy does not make sense to me.

Re: Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)

#52

Post by pyrale »

alphazard wrote: post #32

The author is critical primarily of Elm's governance and processes, and claims that these are what killed the project. I don't think that's entirely true. There was a recent interview with the creator of Elm here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SUM4869ODc I'd encourage everyone to watch that as a grain of salt to TFA. It seems like the project leader felt he was being taken advantage of, and was just not getting ou…

> I'd encourage everyone to watch that as a grain of salt to TFA. It seems like the project leader felt he was being taken advantage of, and was just not getting out as much as he was putting in.

That's two different topics. The work situation Evan had with NRI is completely unrelated to what he and the core team decided to shape the community into, which is the subject of TFA's criticism.

> That's his decision to make and he doesn't owe anyone anything.

In the world of emergent programming languages, the language author isn't the only one taking risks. Early adopters do have skin in the game, and their work spent growing the ecosystem is valuable. Sure, I get that Evan doesn't owe work to anyone. However, he also made sure that everyone in the community had to rely on him, and that's the issue.

In retrospect, Luke Plant correctly identified the risks Elm's community management style created, and eventually these risks came to materialize.

For these reasons, I can't advise people to touch anything Evan does in the future.

> Elm's governance and process are what made it such a delight to use.

I guess you haven't been personally contacted by a member of the core team trying to steer you into changing course on a technical topic. That interaction was not delightful.

Re: Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)

#53

Post by shipp02 »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #43
maxiepoo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically, Evan decided he wanted Elm to be a pre-packaged closed ecosystem where it was easy to develop very simple standalone apps, but made it very difficult to impossible to actually integrate with any existing JavaScript code or libraries. This was a baffling decision to people who thought Elm was supposed to be a practical language. Blaming everything on "entitlement" from people who bought Elm's marketing abou…

The entitlement doesn't come from thinking "dang, the project doesn't do what I want". It comes from getting worked up that it doesn't. And it comes from getting worked up that your github/forum/slack correspondence doesn't go in your favor just because you really want something, even if you think you should have more clout because it's a small community. Elm made a controversial but reasonable trade-off for its pack…

But they didn't make that tradeoff.

They said sync FFI for us but not for you.

Re: Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)

#54

Post by pyrale »

FullGarden_S wrote: post #50
santoshalper wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dead means different things to different people, but there is no way in hell I'd start a new project using a niche language that hasn't been updated in almost a year.

I see. I would though. ELM has a very simple, straight forward syntax and everything revolves around the ELM architecture, which makes the whole thing very intuitive. I believe a statically typed and functional language will do just fine without any update for years as long as the initial implementation is done right. Unless there is a need to add some new feature, there is not point in updating the language if all t…

> there is not point in updating the language if all the essentials were well implemented already.

There are bugfix PRs open for years now on the compiler and the core libraries.

Re: Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)

#55

Post by idoubtit »

evmar wrote: post #13
satvikpendem wrote: post #2

I remember reading this article when it was published, it seems like everything said continues to be true about Elm, so much that I don't hear about anyone using Elm these days, as even those who have used it as legacy code have now largely had enough time to migrate away.

I don't really follow Elm, but I was curious and tried to see whether the project is still alive. It appears the last commits on GitHub are from mid 2024 and the last installable release was 2019. It appears the main developer is working on a new thing? There's definitely a "the bear is sticky with honey" confusion of discussion over whether it's dead or not. It would be nice for interested strangers like me if they…

> It appears the last commits on GitHub are from mid 2024

That's not what I see.

The last commits for elm/compiler were minor fixes in 2023. Last substantial changes were in 2021. See https://github.com/elm/compiler/commits/master/

The last commits for elm/core were in the first months of 2021. See https://github.com/elm/core/commits/master/

> It appears the main developer is working on a new thing?

One of the problems is that the developer said several times, even in a recent interview, that he was still working on elm, with a focus on the long term. He gave a few vague hints about his private roadmap. After 4 years without any real public activity, I find it hard to believe there's some private activity.

Re: Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)

#56

Post by pyrale »

cma256 wrote: post #24

Still the best web language and framework ever introduced. Its influence is everywhere. Unfortunately no one implements all of it so they can never live up to the standard it set. I would recommend everyone avoid reading this article. It didn't accomplish anything. In the five years since writing nothing has changed and no alternative replaced it. Elm is not used because the JavaScript community chose something else…

As a former Elm production user, the article is spot-on about why I moved on from the Elm community.

Re: Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)

#57

Post by satvikpendem »

felixguendling wrote: post #38

I asked "Ask HN: Is Elm dead" in 2022 with mixed results. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31485011 IMO it's safe to say that Elm is dead and won't come back with this attitude of the core team (which is not the only problem of the language). We never switched to Elm 0.19 from 0.18 but moved on to rewrite in Svelte 5 with TypeScript and never looked back.

I saw these threads pop up here and there over the years, always funny to read comments (even in this very thread!) about how (paraphrasing) "good ideas take time" and "the creator shouldn't add everything people are asking for into the language," meanwhile the last release is still 0.19 in 2018 and I honestly don't know what Evan and the core team have been doing with regards to Elm since then.

There's a vast gulf between being prudent with feature additions, and doing effectively nothing at all. Of course a language that preaches the former but materializes the latter would die sooner or later, as people get fed up with the lack of updates. And in the meantime, TypeScript just gets better and better.

Re: Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)

#58

Post by satvikpendem »

pyrale wrote: post #54
FullGarden_S wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see. I would though. ELM has a very simple, straight forward syntax and everything revolves around the ELM architecture, which makes the whole thing very intuitive. I believe a statically typed and functional language will do just fine without any update for years as long as the initial implementation is done right. Unless there is a need to add some new feature, there is not point in updating the language if all t…

> there is not point in updating the language if all the essentials were well implemented already. There are bugfix PRs open for years now on the compiler and the core libraries.

And keep in mind you can't even fork the compiler to fix them lest you be cast out of their community, whatever is left of it anyway!

Re: Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)

#59

Post by satvikpendem »

benatkin wrote: post #9
Philpax wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42954103 , which does not really concern Elm.

He’s the author of the article but only chimes in once. Sorry for not linking it, just wasn’t sure I wanted a Google Alert, but it seems likely at this point and I don’t mind. I’m somewhat undecided about Elm and Roc. Both are at least innovative.

Not sure what you mean by Google Alert, what is that regarding?

Re: Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)

#60

Post by pyrale »

chongli wrote: post #45
josephcsible wrote: post #5

tl;dr: the Elm compiler has a hardcoded whitelist of projects allowed to use certain critical language features, and anyone who releases a fork of the compiler without that antifeature gets banned from the project's community.

So why hasn't anyone set up their own hard-fork community a la neovim? Just not enough interest in it?

The community is small enough that it wouldn't make much sense.
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