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Every time I read an article on HN about Elm, I go through a moment of confusion. Elm wasn't just some random piece of rarely-used free software where it makes
by cjensen 12y ago
Every time I read an article on HN about Elm, I go through a moment of confusion. Elm wasn't just some random piece of rarely-used free software where it makes sense to re-use the name. It was an extremely popular mail program. If you're reading HN, you are the kind of person who 20 years ago would have used or at least tried Elm.
It's a bad idea to re-use a name for a product when the prior product targeted essentially the same users.
- corysama 12y agoA very large percentage of the HN population has been using computers for less than 15 years. The creator of Elm is a very smart cookie. But, there's a good chance he has never heard of the Elm mail client. I've got bad news for ya: We're old.
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoAs long as the successor language isn't called pine. Frankly, its not a big deal.
- rdc12 12y agoGood chance that the creator of Elm, has heard of google thou
- pjmlp 12y ago> I've got bad news for ya: We're old. Yes, I do notice that every time I discuss about the days when C was UNIX only, we had a huge variety of OS and hardware architectures to chose from or simple things like language design. All themes that seem century old for the majority of HN crowd.
- ghshephard 12y agoBut elm isn't particularly old - as recently as 1999, when I started doing IT at Loudcloud, there were a bunch of users who still wanted to use elm as their primary email client. It's like naming something "eudora"
- freehunter 12y ago1999 was 16 years ago. The last release of Elm (the mail client) was 10 years ago. I started using the Internet back when AOL was still charging an hourly (rather than monthly) fee, and if I've ever heard of Elm (the mail client), it wasn't enough to be able to remember it today. So yes, Elm (the mail client) is particularly old.