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Road to Elm 1.0

elm-lang.org

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Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#61

Post by auslegung »

Munksgaard wrote: post #22
auslegung wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stability. It works. Frequent breaking changes to core functionality of your tech stack is not a feature, it’s a bug.

Does it though? They are many longstanding bugs reported in their compiler repository, and this release doesn't seem to address any of them.

Longstanding issues that prevent usage? Not for me and the projects I’ve been apart of. No doubt there are plenty of reported issues, and no doubt they truly negatively impact some users, but I would still much rather choose the usability and stability of Elm 0.19.1-2 than anything in the typescript ecosystem today

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#62

Post by lioeters »

chipdale wrote: post #31
ale wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know right. I’m glad DSLs have fallen out of fashion. Just use the platform.

I can understand why developers might not care for DSLs, especially when they force a choice between entirely different toolsets and toolchains. However, I feel people often miss the real value of a good DSL: it's not about the syntax, but about providing hardened semantics that can bolster or guarantee desired qualities. Elm, for instance, provides value insofar as it makes producing runtime exceptions significantly…

I recently learned about that too, how Lean provides ways to create new language syntax and DSLs, which is (on the surface) similar to Lisps like Racket. It's like operator overloading but way more flexible and general purpose. I'm wary of such language features, convenient for specific purposes (like working with vectors or matrices) but I'm afraid it's too powerful for normal usage, if everyone starts building their own DSLs and syntaxes, it would likely make the typical codebase difficult to read and understand. For example, the C++ template metaprogramming madness, it can be used responsibly but in my opinion it was detrimental to the language ecosystem.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#64

Post by mrkeen »

desireco42 wrote: post #43

I hope to see progress in the future. I loved Elm and it made me a better programmer. Things changed a lot since then, but beauty of Elm is not matched by any language. Also, if you ever had to refactor anything, there is no language in the world that makes it as easy to change things. Hope to see more releases in the future.

You should try more languages

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#65

Post by rapind »

auslegung wrote: post #58
rapind wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's improved, but I was very disappointed to find agents constantly tripping over significant white space with Elm (Claude Code). Always struck me as strange since they are very proficient with python... and Elm has been one of the most stable modern languages (so stable that people complain about it never changing!). I think the last time I tried was a year ago though, so I assume it has improved.

I started working with Elm in production again about a year ago and have bounced back and forth between codex and Claude code and haven’t noticed whitespace problems, so I would conclude it’s better but of course your mileage may vary

I was already working with elm (have been since Signals) and I was very disappointed in what agents (CC) produced. In contrast, I was pleased with the Rust code they produced.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#66

Post by hollowturtle »

auslegung wrote: post #19

About two years ago I was experimenting with ChatGPT vibecoding a snake game in the browser in elm, because elm is my favorite language. It was rough going and I concluded at the time that LLM‘s might kill elm. Today I use elm in production and LLMs are vastly better at it, and if anything I think LLM‘s might increase elm adoption because it is the ideal language for an LLM right now. It’s a simpler language than mos…

> I think LLM‘s might increase elm adoption because it is the ideal language for an LLM right now

Yes but no? It really just depends on the amount of elm in the training data and rlhf. I agree that structured frameworks/languages have codebases more similar to one another and that would ease generation. But that alone won't work and usually dev adoption is a total discourse per se

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#67

Post by [deleted] »

auslegung wrote: post #19

About two years ago I was experimenting with ChatGPT vibecoding a snake game in the browser in elm, because elm is my favorite language. It was rough going and I concluded at the time that LLM‘s might kill elm. Today I use elm in production and LLMs are vastly better at it, and if anything I think LLM‘s might increase elm adoption because it is the ideal language for an LLM right now. It’s a simpler language than mos…

[deleted]

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#68

Post by brokencode »

bbkane wrote: post #54

I think of Elm more as an incredibly influential research language these days. It's very focused, there's no public roadmap or official support and the leadership (which is far as I can tell is just Evan) is uninterested in most (any?) community building or core team building. But MAN is it nice to work in. This has resulted in several forks/spin-offs. At the recent Gleam conference, Louis Pilfold joked that every El…

Yeah Elm has had a very strange arc, but I think calling it a research language is right.

There was a period where it was heavily evangelized. Many blog posts were written and talks given, and there was a lot of enthusiasm and adoption.

Then the author just kind of disappeared and the project stalled.

Which of course he had a right to do since it’s his project, but I think he should have set expectations better from the beginning.

The heavy evangelism helped spread the ideas, but also set up developers to feel blindsided and abandoned.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#69

Post by RussianCow »

hollowturtle wrote: post #66
auslegung wrote: post #19

About two years ago I was experimenting with ChatGPT vibecoding a snake game in the browser in elm, because elm is my favorite language. It was rough going and I concluded at the time that LLM‘s might kill elm. Today I use elm in production and LLMs are vastly better at it, and if anything I think LLM‘s might increase elm adoption because it is the ideal language for an LLM right now. It’s a simpler language than mos…

> I think LLM‘s might increase elm adoption because it is the ideal language for an LLM right now Yes but no? It really just depends on the amount of elm in the training data and rlhf. I agree that structured frameworks/languages have codebases more similar to one another and that would ease generation. But that alone won't work and usually dev adoption is a total discourse per se

That's not why Elm is an ideal language for LLMs: it's because, if it compiles, it's most likely working software. Agentic workflows have gotten significantly better over the last year, so LLMs using languages like Elm, Haskell, or even Rust have an amazing feedback loop where even lower quality models can keep trying until things compile.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#70

Post by ff_ »

jgwil2 wrote: post #50

On the subject of functional languages with JS as a compilation target, is anyone still using PureScript?

There are a few of us still at it :)

Though with the advent of LLMs it became very easy to spin up alternate backends for it, so it's very much alive outside of JS as well.

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