7 ms·

I'm not surprised Elm is not viable anymore at a medium or large company, despite continuing to use it every day myself for side projects. The creator has delib

I'm not surprised Elm is not viable anymore at a medium or large company, despite continuing to use it every day myself for side projects. The creator has deliberately shunned publicity or popularity for it in the last few years so adoption and therefore hiring has slowed to a crawl. We still have a vibrant and passionate small community, but the emphasis is on "small". No matter how superior it is to e.g. React it will lose out at a company level if you have pay the price of retraining all your frontend devs to "think in elm" to continue using it. I'm mainly sad that we'll be losing the chance of any future Kevin Yank videos about Elm. I really love the videos of his I've seen on youtube, including non-Elm ones such as the one about how to use VoiceOver for devs [0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38qQzmkXGS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38qQzmkXGS4

slimsag 4y ago
What are your thoughts on the direct descendant, Roc? [0] I know it's pre v0.1 so maybe you don't have any, but as a fellow Elm lover it seems pretty compelling on the surface albeit less directly frontend-dev focused. [0] https://github.com/roc-lang/roc https://github.com/roc-lang/roc
- JohnCurran 4y ago
  There is also gren, a fork of Elm being actively developed https://gren-lang.org/ https://gren-lang.org/
- pyrale 4y ago
  That's the language's claim, but it really feels weird to call oneself a direct descendent when the original language creator has not left the boat.
  - kelipso 4y ago
    It's just what a fork is, no?
    - pyrale 4y ago
      afaik, it's not a fork of Elm, they started from a clean slate.
      - kelipso 4y ago
        Right I see. At any rate, C has hundreds of languages as its direct descendants, it's a common term used for programming languages.
  - zem 4y ago
    why? my parents are alive and I'm still their direct descendant (: it's just acknowledging the language's roots.
ricardobeat 4y ago
> it will lose out at a company level if you have pay the price of retraining all your frontend devs to "think in elm" to continue using it This is something every framework is up against, since React won. It has become more and more of its own JS dialect, so devs that grow up with it also “think in React”.
- rcme 4y ago
  On the other hand, React is super slow, a problem which is further exacerbated by the fact that rendering and invalidation happens somewhat indirectly, meaning it’s really easy to accidentally make something super slow. For your run of the mill website, this probably doesn’t matter. But for interactive web content, it can absolutely be a competitive advantage to use something faster and more responsive.
  - MajimasEyepatch 4y ago
    I don’t think I’ve ever seen a web app where the performance of React was such a bottleneck that it would in any way justify migrating to another tech stack. You’d have to get so far into a project for that to become an issue that the cost of switching would be huge.
    - rcme 4y ago
      Have you tried the new Reddit website?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - yladiz 4y ago
        Do you think it’s solely because of React?
        rcme 4y ago
        If you read my original post, one of my points was that React’s rendering and data model makes it too easy to render unnecessarily, which causes perf issues.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
G4BB3R 4y ago
Elm is used in many medium/large companies. The biggest ones are NoRedInk and Vendr, the later reached 1B valuation recently with 600k+ loc Elm codebase.
brundolf 4y ago
> not viable anymore at a medium or large company That's not really the point made in the article, he mainly talked about the difficulties of maintaining a hybrid codebase split between Elm and another framework, and how their specific company situation nudged them to choose React to go all-in with

slimsag 4y ago

What are your thoughts on the direct descendant, Roc? [0] I know it's pre v0.1 so maybe you don't have any, but as a fellow Elm lover it seems pretty compelling on the surface albeit less directly frontend-dev focused. [0] https://github.com/roc-lang/roc https://github.com/roc-lang/roc

JohnCurran 4y ago
There is also gren, a fork of Elm being actively developed https://gren-lang.org/ https://gren-lang.org/
pyrale 4y ago
That's the language's claim, but it really feels weird to call oneself a direct descendent when the original language creator has not left the boat.
- kelipso 4y ago
  It's just what a fork is, no?
  - pyrale 4y ago
    afaik, it's not a fork of Elm, they started from a clean slate.
    - kelipso 4y ago
      Right I see. At any rate, C has hundreds of languages as its direct descendants, it's a common term used for programming languages.
- zem 4y ago
  why? my parents are alive and I'm still their direct descendant (: it's just acknowledging the language's roots.

ricardobeat 4y ago

> it will lose out at a company level if you have pay the price of retraining all your frontend devs to "think in elm" to continue using it This is something every framework is up against, since React won. It has become more and more of its own JS dialect, so devs that grow up with it also “think in React”.

rcme 4y ago
On the other hand, React is super slow, a problem which is further exacerbated by the fact that rendering and invalidation happens somewhat indirectly, meaning it’s really easy to accidentally make something super slow. For your run of the mill website, this probably doesn’t matter. But for interactive web content, it can absolutely be a competitive advantage to use something faster and more responsive.
- MajimasEyepatch 4y ago
  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a web app where the performance of React was such a bottleneck that it would in any way justify migrating to another tech stack. You’d have to get so far into a project for that to become an issue that the cost of switching would be huge.
  - rcme 4y ago
    Have you tried the new Reddit website?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - yladiz 4y ago
      Do you think it’s solely because of React?
      - rcme 4y ago
        If you read my original post, one of my points was that React’s rendering and data model makes it too easy to render unnecessarily, which causes perf issues.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

G4BB3R 4y ago

Elm is used in many medium/large companies. The biggest ones are NoRedInk and Vendr, the later reached 1B valuation recently with 600k+ loc Elm codebase.

brundolf 4y ago

> not viable anymore at a medium or large company That's not really the point made in the article, he mainly talked about the difficulties of maintaining a hybrid codebase split between Elm and another framework, and how their specific company situation nudged them to choose React to go all-in with