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Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)

lukeplant.me.uk

81–89 of 89 posts

Re: Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's dead, maybe it just doesn't know it yet.

No, its not. They are focused on introducing ELM on the backend as well. ELM isn't backed by big corpos like Rust and Go do so their way of operation will differ by a huge margin than those two langs, especially in terms of marketing so its inaccurate to judge that its dead just due to the inactivity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SUM4869ODc

It has been dead for years and years. I had an interest in learning and using Elm several years ago, but the bus factor of 1 told me it was dead on arrival.

Re: Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)

#82
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…

> Elm is not used because the JavaScript community chose something else not because of anything mentioned in this article.

Actually a big reason why the JS community chose something else has a lot to do with what is mentioned in the article. Typescript has a much different governance.

Re: Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Koka is still pretty much one person's project [0], and it's not for lack of PRs [1]. To push Koka forward at the kind of pace that Richard wants to move would require forking it or commandeering it, and it makes total sense that neither option is as appealing as just starting fresh. [0] https://github.com/koka-lang/koka/graphs/contributors [1] https://github.com/koka-lang/koka/graphs/contributors

I think your second link meant to go to the open PRs... but anyway there are only 30 open PRs? That seems relatively low?

Oh, yes, I pasted the same link twice!

30 PRs that have been open for a very long time untouched. The point is getting stuff merged into Koka is not easy.

Re: Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)

#84

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…

This is a frustrating comment because it doesn't engage with anything the article is saying and just tries to counter it with the truism that "he doesn't owe anyone anything", something which the author specifically addressed at the beginning of his post.

Guess what, if the project leader doesn't owe anyone anything, then the author of TFA also doesn't owe him anything.

Re: Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, its not. They are focused on introducing ELM on the backend as well. ELM isn't backed by big corpos like Rust and Go do so their way of operation will differ by a huge margin than those two langs, especially in terms of marketing so its inaccurate to judge that its dead just due to the inactivity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SUM4869ODc

It has been dead for years and years. I had an interest in learning and using Elm several years ago, but the bus factor of 1 told me it was dead on arrival.

Elm is not dead. It works. I use it for side projects. If Evan gets hit by a bus, Elm will continue working. Software does not need constant updates.

Re: Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)

#86

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.

This may be a good summary of the blog post, but in my opinion it is an uninformed understanding of Elm and Elm's history. JavaScript FFI isn't and never has been a "critical language feature". Rather, people discovered an implementation detail that allowed them to create thin Elm wrappers around JS libs (think Elm interface for d3, leaflet, moment, etc...). This was (rightly IMO) seen as undesirable for multiple reasons and 0.19 closed off the loophole at the compiler level.

As for being banned from the community, I keep seeing this claim but have never seen or heard of such things happening. Sure, there may be a negative reception to folks who keep wanting to re-litigate a decision that was made over and over, but nobody has been banned from anything.

Re: Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)

#87
post #70
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…

Per TFA, you don't just get "snide remarks" if you fork the compiler. You get booted from all the official community spaces. Given that those are the first place someone would go to seek help if and when they need one, especially for a community that small, that feels like a considerable risk.

The authors of Gren are all active in Elm community spaces. The first commit of Gren is the last public commit of Elm.

Re: Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)

#88
post #35

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.

That burns any interest I ever had for looking into Elm.

The language features in question are, to my knowledge, unrestricted JS FFI and adding infix operators. Banning the former completely removes a whole class of security vulnerabilities. Banning the latter means you can't be as terse as you want but new authors in a codebase don't have the problem that new authors in a Haskell codebase can have. So they're both tradeoffs.

Re: Why I'm leaving Elm (2020)

#89
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been dead for years and years. I had an interest in learning and using Elm several years ago, but the bus factor of 1 told me it was dead on arrival.

Elm is not dead. It works. I use it for side projects. If Evan gets hit by a bus, Elm will continue working. Software does not need constant updates.

You say tomato, I say Elm is dead. Nobody will use this for new real projects.
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