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> Even though Elm is a small language with a small community, that doesn’t affect the Elm experience in a noticeable way. This conclusion was pulled out of thi

> Even though Elm is a small language with a small community, that doesn’t affect the Elm experience in a noticeable way. This conclusion was pulled out of thin air, with no justification from the rest of the article. The title is misleading, the article is really about why the author enjoys Elm over JavaScript... The general rule of thumb that a larger active community leads to faster software development is more or less still true. There is no reason to suspect this is not the case with Elm. It's all fun and games until you get hired to build a production-grade web stack in a dinky game-scripting language with no community, that you have written 0 lines of code in. Some people live and breath to reinvent wheels in 19 different languages. Not my cup of tea.

quickthrower2 9y ago
> The general rule of thumb that a larger active community leads to faster software development is more or less still true. There is no reason to suspect this is not the case with Elm. Yes, and not only because the volume of copy-paste source code on StackOverflow. I suspect Elm is slower to get a feature out, but once it is out you spend less time fixing bugs in feature A caused by adding feature B silently changing some assumptions you made in code. And so later on in the same project ... you are faster. > It's all fun and games until you get hired to build a production-grade web stack in a dinky game-scripting language with no community, that you have written 0 lines of code in. Some people live and breath to reinvent wheels in 19 different languages. Not my cup of tea. From what I have seen Elm is absolutely fit for production grade work. There is a community. The community tends to have smarter on average people in it. Simply because all the less smart people are put off. Sounds elitist? Maybe.
- anonytrary 9y ago
  > There is a community. The community tends to have smarter on average people in it. Simply because all the less smart people are put off. A community shouldn't be judged based on how smart everyone is (quite a difficult measure), a more useful metric would be how many useful community libraries there are. For example, if I can choose between 50 carousels implemented in React vs. 2 in Elm, and I'm an average developer -- what will I choose? Modern JavaScript undoubtedly towers over Elm in terms of go-to-market time for arbitrary apps. > you spend less time fixing bugs in feature A caused by adding feature B silently changing some assumptions you made in code. This is a big problem with 2007 JavaScript and jQuery. React/Vue and other declarative VDOM frameworks bring the Elm philosophy to the masses.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > A community shouldn't be judged based on how smart everyone is (quite a difficult measure), a more useful metric would be how many useful community libraries there are That seems more of a metric for an ecosystem than a community.
    - anonytrary 9y ago
      It's presumptuous to assume "community A is smarter than community B". It's just not even the right question to ask. Better questions to ask are "what are third party libs like?", "how active are people in this community?", "how active is the SO and other forums?". These are actionable questions. "People who use Elm are smarter" is simply not actionable information. What does it even mean? It's meaningless.
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        > It's presumptuous to assume "community A is smarter than community B". To assume with no basis, sure; to conclude it may or may not be. > It's just not even the right question to ask. It's not inherently operationalized, sure, though (as seen elsewhere in this thread), “advertising jobs for platform A results in us needing to filter out fewer candidates with no real programming ability than when we advertise jobs for platform B” I'd pretty much an operationalization of it, and quite (to address your later point) actionable.
        anonytrary 9y ago
        You're saying the "simpler" route will attract newer devs and dilute the skill pool.
      - quickthrower2 9y ago
        > It's presumptuous to assume "community A is smarter than community B" You can e.g. Rocket scientists VS. Janitors. Note what I am not saying (which people might take offense to) is "you use Vue not Elm, so you are dumb". Nope of course that isn't true!. I am saying in aggregate, due to selection biases etc, Elm attracts smart people. A lot of really smart people will stick to popular frameworks and not use Elm. Some bad programmers might use Elm for some reason. Aggregates are what I am talking about. > "what are third party libs like?", "how active are people in this community?", "how active is the SO and other forums?". These are actionable questions. These are good questions. Another question though is: how much do I trust another library to not have bugs? Given Elm's design vs. vanilla JS, I'd go for Elm. That confidence extends to "How much do I trust a Library I knocked up over the weekend to solve an previously unsolved problem in Elm".
- hellohn123 9y ago
  > The community tends to have smarter on average people in it. Simply because all the less smart people are put off. Sounds elitist? Maybe. Have you thought about the possibility that it's actually a community of people who first and foremost _consider_ themselves as being smarter than the rest? Maybe this is what's really off-putting to equally smart, but more humble developers?
  - quickthrower2 9y ago
    Not with elm. Its a nice intersection of smart and down-to-earth / helpful types. And "smart" here means "conscientious, passionate developer smart" not "born with 200 IQ". I don't get any impression that elmers "_consider_ themselves as being smarter than the rest" from talking on the reddit etc. Haskellers though, I think it's a different story, but YMMV.

quickthrower2 9y ago

> The general rule of thumb that a larger active community leads to faster software development is more or less still true. There is no reason to suspect this is not the case with Elm. Yes, and not only because the volume of copy-paste source code on StackOverflow. I suspect Elm is slower to get a feature out, but once it is out you spend less time fixing bugs in feature A caused by adding feature B silently changing some assumptions you made in code. And so later on in the same project ... you are faster. > It's all fun and games until you get hired to build a production-grade web stack in a dinky game-scripting language with no community, that you have written 0 lines of code in. Some people live and breath to reinvent wheels in 19 different languages. Not my cup of tea. From what I have seen Elm is absolutely fit for production grade work. There is a community. The community tends to have smarter on average people in it. Simply because all the less smart people are put off. Sounds elitist? Maybe.

anonytrary 9y ago
> There is a community. The community tends to have smarter on average people in it. Simply because all the less smart people are put off. A community shouldn't be judged based on how smart everyone is (quite a difficult measure), a more useful metric would be how many useful community libraries there are. For example, if I can choose between 50 carousels implemented in React vs. 2 in Elm, and I'm an average developer -- what will I choose? Modern JavaScript undoubtedly towers over Elm in terms of go-to-market time for arbitrary apps. > you spend less time fixing bugs in feature A caused by adding feature B silently changing some assumptions you made in code. This is a big problem with 2007 JavaScript and jQuery. React/Vue and other declarative VDOM frameworks bring the Elm philosophy to the masses.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > A community shouldn't be judged based on how smart everyone is (quite a difficult measure), a more useful metric would be how many useful community libraries there are That seems more of a metric for an ecosystem than a community.
  - anonytrary 9y ago
    It's presumptuous to assume "community A is smarter than community B". It's just not even the right question to ask. Better questions to ask are "what are third party libs like?", "how active are people in this community?", "how active is the SO and other forums?". These are actionable questions. "People who use Elm are smarter" is simply not actionable information. What does it even mean? It's meaningless.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > It's presumptuous to assume "community A is smarter than community B". To assume with no basis, sure; to conclude it may or may not be. > It's just not even the right question to ask. It's not inherently operationalized, sure, though (as seen elsewhere in this thread), “advertising jobs for platform A results in us needing to filter out fewer candidates with no real programming ability than when we advertise jobs for platform B” I'd pretty much an operationalization of it, and quite (to address your later point) actionable.
      - anonytrary 9y ago
        You're saying the "simpler" route will attract newer devs and dilute the skill pool.
    - quickthrower2 9y ago
      > It's presumptuous to assume "community A is smarter than community B" You can e.g. Rocket scientists VS. Janitors. Note what I am not saying (which people might take offense to) is "you use Vue not Elm, so you are dumb". Nope of course that isn't true!. I am saying in aggregate, due to selection biases etc, Elm attracts smart people. A lot of really smart people will stick to popular frameworks and not use Elm. Some bad programmers might use Elm for some reason. Aggregates are what I am talking about. > "what are third party libs like?", "how active are people in this community?", "how active is the SO and other forums?". These are actionable questions. These are good questions. Another question though is: how much do I trust another library to not have bugs? Given Elm's design vs. vanilla JS, I'd go for Elm. That confidence extends to "How much do I trust a Library I knocked up over the weekend to solve an previously unsolved problem in Elm".
hellohn123 9y ago
> The community tends to have smarter on average people in it. Simply because all the less smart people are put off. Sounds elitist? Maybe. Have you thought about the possibility that it's actually a community of people who first and foremost _consider_ themselves as being smarter than the rest? Maybe this is what's really off-putting to equally smart, but more humble developers?
- quickthrower2 9y ago
  Not with elm. Its a nice intersection of smart and down-to-earth / helpful types. And "smart" here means "conscientious, passionate developer smart" not "born with 200 IQ". I don't get any impression that elmers "_consider_ themselves as being smarter than the rest" from talking on the reddit etc. Haskellers though, I think it's a different story, but YMMV.