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Would also be interesting to hear the reasoning of someone who has seriously considered using Elm but ended up with not using it.
by sebst 8y ago
Would also be interesting to hear the reasoning of someone who has seriously considered using Elm but ended up with not using it.
- crote 8y agoIt's a neat little language. The benefits are real when coming from JS, but not that special when you consider other languages. Basically everything said in favour of Elm is completely true, but it's not the whole story. The ecosystem offers some trivial packages, but the hard stuff is missing. JS interop is intentionally quite painful. I'd consider it sufficient for fairly trivial SPA use, but lacking for anything large or anything requiring browser APIs. The language development is a big red flag: virtually all commits have been made by a single developer. There are no RFCs, and the future direction of the language is very unclear. Any discussions about potential improvements are immediately killed. Releases are infrequent, and may cause very significant breakage, depending on your application. It's probably the best thing in the JS ecosystem in a long time and i really want it to succeed and to use it more, but the current state isn't that great. Maybe in a year or ten.
- peruvian 8y agoThe bus factor of Elm is pretty bad compared to more "open" projects with RFCs, a dozen or so contributors, etc. In some ways it still feels like someone's private project. The problem with having a bus factor of 1 is that no one sees it as a problem until it becomes one.
- razze 8y agoWhile it seems like a bus factor of one, my understanding is that there is a plan in place (probably from the people at noredink). Even if not, the code is open source and can be forked, which should only be the very very last option.