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Comment by Keats | Hacker News Reader

I like Elm but its development really seems to rely on a single person. I saw this post on elm-discuss which is a pretty good summary of my thoughts https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/elm-discuss/AmxE3qAm...

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Evan wants to design Elm as thoughtfully as he can, and has been deliberately resisting community evolution. Eventually it will get too big and too useful, and he'll lose the ability to make big breaking changes easily. So he's tried to maintain control of the direction of the language and community during these early years while he figures it out. He's trying to reduce the feedback loop and come up with the best possible base before it starts to scale.

It feels like it's stabilizing. I expect that over the next year or so this will change dramatically and it will become much more community driven.

' during these early years' should feature prominently in their docs/website if that is case.

If you go to http://elm-lang.org/ they make it looks like its production ready. No mention of breaking changes/beta ect. You have to choose one or the other .

The version number starting with a zero really ought to denote that, notwithstanding the JS crowd's seemingly fast and loose approach.

The Elm community is very strict about semver. Given this context, in Evan's defense, the 0.17 version is not a mistake as the API is still in flux.

It seems like communicating this approach to the community might be helpful for some. The poster's perspective is not unique (see the links in this thread). An evolution from benevolent dictatorship to democracy has advantages and precedent. Communicating with the community these intentions is important and a sign of respect and maturity. I think in itself it would be stabilizing.

for what it's worth, the compiler helps you find those breaking changes pretty quickly.

much better than having bugs sneak up on you in production

Yep every 'native' library needed arduous review process via github issues. I waited for over a month for elm overlords to approve my 'native use' library , they simply closed the issue.

Dropped elm for react and co. Now I have serverside rendering, code splitting, working debugger ect which was impossible with elm.

This was last year though so not sure if it is still the process. YMV.

It has changed, in that the language is moving away from Native code, and instead is trying to provide the web-platform as part of the language/core libs.

And for everything else, there's Ports. You can't use them in libraries, but for your own projects they're a much better JS FFI.

>And for everything else, there's Ports.

Ports are extremely tedious to use if you are doing anything even moderately complicated .

Same here and for that very reason I'll continue playing with Elm (it's fun) but ultimately I'm focusing more on learning Clojurescript as it seems to be the safer "sane" way out of JS/React country, at least for my professional projects.

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