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Honestly I think the main reason for this perception is that people in the Elm community have gotten increasingly tired of correcting inaccuracies people like t

Honestly I think the main reason for this perception is that people in the Elm community have gotten increasingly tired of correcting inaccuracies people like to post about Elm on Hacker News. I spent a bunch of time doing that in the past, and eventually stopped because I felt like Sisyphus. The same people would crop up on the next thread repeating the same things anyway. Of course if the claims go unchallenged, it leads to the perception that they're accurate...but that doesn't make engaging with them any more enjoyable a way to spend one's free time. If you want to check the health of the Elm community, visit Elm Slack and ask in the #beginners channel how people feel about it. It takes about the same amount of time as posting a HN comment, but it gives a very different perspective than the one you'd get if your main source of Elm information was Hacker News comments! :) http://elmlang.herokuapp.com/ http://elmlang.herokuapp.com/

superdisk 5y ago
Speaking as someone who liked Elm for a while, then abandoned it, I will say that the biggest problem with the language is absolutely its leadership. Development moves at an absolutely glacial pace and basically takes place with no transparency at all. I would argue that it's more like a "source available" project than an "open source" one since the core dev team is so exclusionary. Most planning takes place inside Evan's head, leaving others to just speculate as to what's going to happen to the language. On top of this, the community is run like a dictatorship. Dissent is silenced and banned, and faux positivity is spread far and wide. I got sick of it and was banned from the Elm subreddit after I expressed my frustration. That's pretty much when I gave up on the language, years ago, on version 0.18 (fwiw, they're on version 0.19 now, that's how slow updates are)
- rtfeldman 5y ago
  This is an example of the type of post I was referring to being tired of correcting. I don't use Reddit anymore, but if memory serves there have been about 5 people total banned from the aforementioned Elm subreddit, which is fewer than 1 ban per year it's existed. I invite anyone to evalute the accuracy of "Dissent is silenced and banned" with that data point in mind, and to evaluate the accuracy of the other above claims accordingly.
  - cultofmetatron 5y ago
    Interesting food for thought. I bought your book awhile back and was 2 chapters in before reading about the aforementioned "Dissent is silenced and banned" issues which led me to abandon continuing at the time. Maybe I'll jump back into it. I've not heard of such misinformation being spread about other languages. Id love to hear your side on why Elm itself seems to attract such ire if its inaccurate.
    - rtfeldman 5y ago
      It's a great question! I think there's more than one factor, but the biggest one comes down to setting expectations, especially in the early days. Elm does a lot of things differently than other languages, and while I think that overall those differences have been instrumental to its success, especially early on it sometimes wasn't clearly enough communicated when "this is temporarily different because it's a WIP; you can expect it to be more like what you're used to in the future" versus "this is different by design, so expect it to stay different or even to become more different." Examples of this include typeclasses (a lot of people coming to Elm from a Haskell background assumed Elm would add them as a matter of course), JS interop (by design, it's not a traditional FFI, although there was an unintended backdoor that kind of worked like one; when that backdoor was finally removed, after much communication that in retrospect should have happened at the outset, some of those who had been relying on it were understandably upset), how the project is run (more like Clojure than like JavaScript), and what the release schedule looks like (batching large projects rather than more frequent smaller releases). I think things are a lot clearer today, but for some it's unfortunately too late to make a difference.
      - gaereth 5y ago
        One thing is that it wasn’t communicated that well, but other (and that’s what made me feel really uncomfortable) is that it felt like „This feature is not allowed anymore - except for some dudes, they’re cool enough and can use it” (e.g. native modules, operators). Either keep or drop feature
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jaeming 5y ago
That's a good point and maybe I shouldn't have re-posted these stories in my comment as I have not personally witnessed this behavior. I just know that when I started learning Elm initially (Nice Frontend master courses btw) I ran into this sentiment a good bit on reddit and hackernews so thought there was probably something to it if it was being echoed by so many. I'll add a reply to my comment to make it clear this is hearsay and doesn't necessarily reflect the truth.
- rtfeldman 5y ago
  Thank you, that's very considerate of you!
Latty 5y ago
I'm a fan of Elm, and I'm using it in production, but I think this is very much a case of using some flaws in the way people see Elm to ignore some correct criticism of it. I've tried to push for fixing the use of CSS Custom Properties in Elm a couple of times (https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/css-custom-properties/5554 https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/css-custom-properties/5554) and it really felt like talking to a wall. The community absolutely suffers whenever anyone comes across one of these issues where there just isn't a solution, and more than that, no communication at all. It implies the project is dead. I accept that Elm is functionally just stalled and won't see any changes until some arbitrary point in the future, I can live with that. I don't think the project communicates it's state and direction well though, and that leads people to disappointment and the posts you see.
nextaccountic 5y ago
The way the language is developed drives me nuts. If someone took the effort to fork Elm I would use it in a heartbeat.

superdisk 5y ago

Speaking as someone who liked Elm for a while, then abandoned it, I will say that the biggest problem with the language is absolutely its leadership. Development moves at an absolutely glacial pace and basically takes place with no transparency at all. I would argue that it's more like a "source available" project than an "open source" one since the core dev team is so exclusionary. Most planning takes place inside Evan's head, leaving others to just speculate as to what's going to happen to the language. On top of this, the community is run like a dictatorship. Dissent is silenced and banned, and faux positivity is spread far and wide. I got sick of it and was banned from the Elm subreddit after I expressed my frustration. That's pretty much when I gave up on the language, years ago, on version 0.18 (fwiw, they're on version 0.19 now, that's how slow updates are)

rtfeldman 5y ago
This is an example of the type of post I was referring to being tired of correcting. I don't use Reddit anymore, but if memory serves there have been about 5 people total banned from the aforementioned Elm subreddit, which is fewer than 1 ban per year it's existed. I invite anyone to evalute the accuracy of "Dissent is silenced and banned" with that data point in mind, and to evaluate the accuracy of the other above claims accordingly.
- cultofmetatron 5y ago
  Interesting food for thought. I bought your book awhile back and was 2 chapters in before reading about the aforementioned "Dissent is silenced and banned" issues which led me to abandon continuing at the time. Maybe I'll jump back into it. I've not heard of such misinformation being spread about other languages. Id love to hear your side on why Elm itself seems to attract such ire if its inaccurate.
  - rtfeldman 5y ago
    It's a great question! I think there's more than one factor, but the biggest one comes down to setting expectations, especially in the early days. Elm does a lot of things differently than other languages, and while I think that overall those differences have been instrumental to its success, especially early on it sometimes wasn't clearly enough communicated when "this is temporarily different because it's a WIP; you can expect it to be more like what you're used to in the future" versus "this is different by design, so expect it to stay different or even to become more different." Examples of this include typeclasses (a lot of people coming to Elm from a Haskell background assumed Elm would add them as a matter of course), JS interop (by design, it's not a traditional FFI, although there was an unintended backdoor that kind of worked like one; when that backdoor was finally removed, after much communication that in retrospect should have happened at the outset, some of those who had been relying on it were understandably upset), how the project is run (more like Clojure than like JavaScript), and what the release schedule looks like (batching large projects rather than more frequent smaller releases). I think things are a lot clearer today, but for some it's unfortunately too late to make a difference.
    - gaereth 5y ago
      One thing is that it wasn’t communicated that well, but other (and that’s what made me feel really uncomfortable) is that it felt like „This feature is not allowed anymore - except for some dudes, they’re cool enough and can use it” (e.g. native modules, operators). Either keep or drop feature
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jaeming 5y ago

That's a good point and maybe I shouldn't have re-posted these stories in my comment as I have not personally witnessed this behavior. I just know that when I started learning Elm initially (Nice Frontend master courses btw) I ran into this sentiment a good bit on reddit and hackernews so thought there was probably something to it if it was being echoed by so many. I'll add a reply to my comment to make it clear this is hearsay and doesn't necessarily reflect the truth.

rtfeldman 5y ago
Thank you, that's very considerate of you!

Latty 5y ago

I'm a fan of Elm, and I'm using it in production, but I think this is very much a case of using some flaws in the way people see Elm to ignore some correct criticism of it. I've tried to push for fixing the use of CSS Custom Properties in Elm a couple of times (https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/css-custom-properties/5554 https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/css-custom-properties/5554) and it really felt like talking to a wall. The community absolutely suffers whenever anyone comes across one of these issues where there just isn't a solution, and more than that, no communication at all. It implies the project is dead. I accept that Elm is functionally just stalled and won't see any changes until some arbitrary point in the future, I can live with that. I don't think the project communicates it's state and direction well though, and that leads people to disappointment and the posts you see.

nextaccountic 5y ago

The way the language is developed drives me nuts. If someone took the effort to fork Elm I would use it in a heartbeat.