Hacker News Reader

Comment by hellofunk | Hacker News Reader

The other problem is that no matter how many times different people bring up the same recommendations for Elm language features, if those opinions are not shared by Evan, they are seen as trivial and unnecessary.

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.

View on HN

There are many decisions about Elm (the language and the development process) that I'm personally not crazy about. However, with so many asking "why are open source maintainers burning out?" I think it's a bit obnoxious for us as a community to criticize someone's chosen style for working on their free gift to us all.

I believe he is paid full time to work on elm. I might be wrong. But if so burn out should be less of an issue.

The issue is that after awhile, a language should not be an individual person's gift to the world. It's a tool, after all. People and companies use and depend on it; users should be given greater freedoms or voices. It's not a piece of art to marvel at; it's something to be tugged on by many angles to create real work by people other than the language author.

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.

I can understand your perspective, but frankly I don't think opening it up would add much value for anyone. He clearly has his own vision, and opening up wider discussion just bogs him down in pointless extra work from his viewpoint. He'd rather just get stuff done, and I think that's a reasonable viewpoint. Nothing stopping you or anyone else from forking Elm if you don't like how things are going.

> wider discussion just bogs him down in pointless extra work

> 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."

I don't even use Elm. I have literally zero vested in Elm, just a passing interest.

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?

> 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.

Yep, there is very little discussion over taking the language in other directions, because ultimately Evan supposedly knows best. It's sad to see such a nice project being bogged down by such a mentality, but Evan really brought this upon himself.

Like the post says, come talk on Slack. That is where the majority of discussions happen.

I would like to voice that there are people who find slack not very good for very active communities.

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.

We have a fully searchable and linkable archive for the Elm Slack, actually. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com