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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. Developmen

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
      - G4BB3R 5y ago
        Kernel code and custom operators are only allowed under elm/ and elm-explorations/, so only 7 core packages can use them. The core developers cannot use those features in projects like everyone else.
        hashbig 5y ago
        And who can contribute to `elm` and `elm-explorations`? The 7 cool dudes. The Elm contributor circle is a clique that you literally have to be a strong contact with one of the contributors to get into it. It goes against everything open source stands for.
        slgeorge 5y ago
        > It goes against everything open source stands for Sorry, that's not correct. It goes against your opinion of what open source should stands for, and many projects run in a way where everyone can contribute. But, it's not the only way. The license determines how the code comes, that's the only rule. There's no rules about how a community must run. It's for the code creator (maintainer) to determine how or even IF they want a community of contributors. There's lots of ways of doing open source! And saying it's not "open source' if you don't do X outside the license is just a No true Scotsman.
        nextaccountic 5y ago
        Open source is a development methodology. The license is the bare minimum.
- zoul 5y ago
  FWIW, I have the same experience as the parent poster. I used to love Elm, evangelized the architecture, wanted to write Elm professionally. I was constantly bumping into things that were not finished or working, but didn’t really mind. But I also often encountered cases where the leadership team was saying “we don’t want this discussion here, thank you very much”, even if the discussion was perfectly legitimate, friendly, technical and related to some sorely needed feature or bugfix. I constantly felt unwelcome, like I was trespassing on someone’s lawn. I didn’t want to base my work on that. Eventually I just shrugged and left.
  - rtfeldman 5y ago
    Totally fair! I'm sorry to hear you had that experience, although I hope maybe you'll someday consider giving it another chance in the future. :) My personal experience has been different, but I upvoted this because I really appreciated that you shared your own experience without overgeneralizing it.
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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
    - G4BB3R 5y ago
      Kernel code and custom operators are only allowed under elm/ and elm-explorations/, so only 7 core packages can use them. The core developers cannot use those features in projects like everyone else.
      - hashbig 5y ago
        And who can contribute to `elm` and `elm-explorations`? The 7 cool dudes. The Elm contributor circle is a clique that you literally have to be a strong contact with one of the contributors to get into it. It goes against everything open source stands for.
        slgeorge 5y ago
        > It goes against everything open source stands for Sorry, that's not correct. It goes against your opinion of what open source should stands for, and many projects run in a way where everyone can contribute. But, it's not the only way. The license determines how the code comes, that's the only rule. There's no rules about how a community must run. It's for the code creator (maintainer) to determine how or even IF they want a community of contributors. There's lots of ways of doing open source! And saying it's not "open source' if you don't do X outside the license is just a No true Scotsman.
        nextaccountic 5y ago
        Open source is a development methodology. The license is the bare minimum.
zoul 5y ago
FWIW, I have the same experience as the parent poster. I used to love Elm, evangelized the architecture, wanted to write Elm professionally. I was constantly bumping into things that were not finished or working, but didn’t really mind. But I also often encountered cases where the leadership team was saying “we don’t want this discussion here, thank you very much”, even if the discussion was perfectly legitimate, friendly, technical and related to some sorely needed feature or bugfix. I constantly felt unwelcome, like I was trespassing on someone’s lawn. I didn’t want to base my work on that. Eventually I just shrugged and left.
- rtfeldman 5y ago
  Totally fair! I'm sorry to hear you had that experience, although I hope maybe you'll someday consider giving it another chance in the future. :) My personal experience has been different, but I upvoted this because I really appreciated that you shared your own experience without overgeneralizing it.

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