From looking at the repositories, I get the feeling that Elm devopment effort has been pretty low for quite a while.
Many pull requests and issues are undiscussed and uprocessed.
Many pull requests and issues are undiscussed and uprocessed.
I feels like Evan doesn't know what to do with the more advanced features that Elm, in my opinion, desperately needs, and I've been pretty unhappy with how he's taken a policy of removing stuff because nobody uses it.
Also, for such a very tiny community, they make it hard to participate in some ways. Many of the github issues are locked for comments unless you are a core contributor. And the mailing list has a lengthy waiting period on the first several new messages sent to it (I've never seen such a tightly moderated list in any language). You would think they would want to embrace anyone who chooses to spend time with their language, but they don't really give average users much of a voice.
> Nothing stopping you or anyone else from forking Elm if you don't like how things are going.
Comments like this are what supports the points I've made here. It's just an attitude I have not seen in other language communities, for better or worse.
Discussions about language design and direction are not usually seen as "pointless."
This is just the reality. He created Elm to use. If others find it useful, great, but why he would he get bogged down in discussing the minutia that always arise in such communities?
Use his work, fork it, or move on. He's clearly not interested in the types of discussions you're interested in having. Why is that wrong?
Maybe it's less than ideal if you want to grow a big community, but again, maybe that's not his goal. He just wants to use it, remember?
It was recently pointed out somewhere (maybe the Elm mailing list) that Evan does not actually touch a production codebase in Elm often.
On the one hand it's a real-time chat, on the other hand it always feels like you are missing out if you are only opening the app now. But you also can't just leave a message and come back later because the scrolling is awful and everyone has probably just moved on from that conversation.
I really prefer IRC + log and something like reddit/mailing lists over slack and have recently stopped interacting with a community that have all moved to slack.
In most languages, like C++, Javascript, Clojure, Elixir -- you find a single person who created the language, and then the real guts of how the industry actually uses it are the results of a large community; the original author usually isn't the sole source of best practices.