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Road to Elm 1.0

elm-lang.org

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Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#81

Post by wavemode »

adastra22 wrote: post #77
Aurornis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then the author just kind of disappeared and the project stalled. There was more to the story than that. They made some major breaking changes in v0.19 that broke a lot of apps and left no path for them to continue with Elm, then dug their heels in when the community protested. If you had an app at your company that used the features they decided not to allow any more, you either had to start deciding which fork to…

What feature is that?

Lots of things were disallowed in 0.19, but probably the most disruptive were that custom native modules were disallowed (which basically means that, only certain official packages would now be allowed to directly call native JavaScript), and the package manager was locked down (which means that you can only install packages from the official elm repository, not GitHub or anywhere else).

You can still indirectly call native JavaScript, in a message-passing kind of way (via Ports or custom elements) but these changes were still really disruptive to many codebases.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#82

Post by 1-more »

miniBill wrote: post #55
lambdas wrote: post #26

Did the restrictions on JavaScript get resolved? IIRC, they made it so you had to use their “Ports” mechanism to interface with JavaScript, and you couldn’t write your own wrappers. There was some drama when someone forked it so you could write your own JavaScript wrappers/FFI too?

FFI is still mostly done through ports (or web components, for the view part). This is an intentional choice and likely to stay until 1.0 and beyond

You can also do lunatic things like overload the `Object` prototype and get synchronous FFI by encoding then decoding an object. I do this at work to get locale-aware sorting. I know you know this, but it'll be news to others in the thread.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#83

Post by 1-more »

pyrale wrote: post #18

> ... and others are more visible features like equatable and hashable types. I love Elm, and I love the community, but I feel a little gaslit here.

say more! Is it that it has typeclasses but they're closed?

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#84

Post by sheept »

auslegung wrote: post #61
Munksgaard wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

When I worked on an Elm app in 2020, my users reported compatibility issues with various browser extensions (e.g. Grammarly, 1Password). I personally would prioritize making my apps usable for my users over making the DX usable for myself, so I stopped using Elm for future projects.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#85

Post by xn »

sesm wrote: post #27
dzonga wrote: post #6

used elm between 2016-17. it taught me a lot of things - such as simplicity. when I ended up switching to react - redux was easy to pick up cz of elm. sadly the ecosystem never grew. but oh man elm is nice & the apps were performant.

What's the Elm definition of simplicity? Genuinely asking, because the concept of simplicity is very vague and overloaded in programming.

The Elm Architecture[1] makes it easy to reason about code. You render the current state. You create a new state by applying a message to the current state.

1. https://guide.elm-lang.org/architecture/

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#86

Post by rgoulter »

rapind wrote: post #48
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…

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 think the last time I tried was a year ago though, so I assume it has improved.

I noticed that coding agents seemed to get pretty good around 2025 Oct/Nov.

If it's improved? My experience with Nickel-lang (probably as not-in-training-data as Elm) is coding agents have improved with this compared to last time I tried.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#87

Post by sheept »

jacobjuul wrote: post #53
willdr wrote: post #28

Did they walk back that thing where certain language features could only be used by the Elm team? That seemed like a language-killer to me.

what?

In Elm 0.19, they removed the ability for third party packages to provide native bindings for JavaScript APIs that the language or its official packages didn't yet support.[0] The only alternative proposed by Evan is to use ports, which are about as ergonomic as calling a function in a web worker.

[0]: https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/native-code-in-0-19/826

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#88

Post by eddd-ddde »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #47
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…

On that note, because of AI I've been more into music, bought a midi keyboard, got real DAW software setup. I've also finally built more and more with Rust, and have been reading more Rust docs. LLMs should never be an excuse not to learn the things you're using it for, those are the bad engineers. An LLM affords me the time to research and learn what it gave me so I can maintain it. It's easier to prompt about the p…

This is very similar to my recent experience!

LLMs are surprisingly effective at helping you learn the "vibes" of making music and understanding various concepts.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#89

Post by wxw »

Back in my undergrad, I took a Functional Programming class taught in Elm. It was primarily about functional data structures, but we also got to build a web app using Elm towards the end.

At the time, I didn't think much of it -- I was probably busy learning React and JavaScript and yada yada for employment purposes.

Now, having spent some time in industry and having used some gargantuan web frameworks, I find myself missing Elm. MVC in Elm is wonderfully straight-forward and easy to reason about.

Congrats on the road to 1.0! Glad to see Elm still active all these years later.

Re: Road to Elm 1.0

#90

Post by cmoski »

akst wrote: post #25

Wish them all the best, I really respected the efforts made to normify some of ideas with unapologetic mathematic names like monads and such But then you see stuff like this https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/ The author is very charitable in their description of the Elm Core teams actions in these interactions, but you read it and they come off entirely unaccountable and dismissive. If they want t…

The automatic closing of threads is so hostile to the community.
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