Hacker News Reader

Comment by fortran77 | Hacker News Reader

I love Elm, but this tutorial is based on Elm 0.18, and 0.19 is out. There are some straighforwared but significant changes with how an application is set up.

If you're just starting out, find a 0.19 tutorial.

View on HN

T.b.h. this is the reason why I will probably stay messing around with either PureScript or ReasonML but stay away from Elm.

Why exactly? Elm 0.19 is out on August 2018, and the only thing that's expected is 0.19.1 which barely changes anything (doesn't break any api). Seems like 0.19 is quite settled at this point.

Ok, I should have said 'one of the reasons' ... and maybe there is a better road-map, but I was dabbling with Elm around 0.16, and then watched 0.17 change a bunch of stuff I liked to bunch of stuff I didn't care about as much and I decided to stay away for a while.

But if it looks like we would be on 0.19.x for few years to come, I might dip in it again ... it's not like I ever published anything in Purescript or ReasonML and I never used Elm in anger, so it is probably just a matter of time til I jump in again :)

Yes, frustration of people going through previous versions is definitely a thing! Let's recall not only the infamous drop of JS FFI (for Ports), but also things like ditching custom operators. Let's see how >0.19 will go.

Will my Elm code written today still be maintainable with an up-to-date elm environment in 3 years? It certainly isn't the case with code written 3 years ago.

Doubtful, but possible. What is highly likely is there will be 1 or 2 upgrades between now and in 3 years. If history is any indicator these upgrades will be relatively painless.

The next upgrade, 0.19.1, will be completely backwards compatible.

By contrast, I have a 12K-line Clojurescript project from 6 years ago that interfaces with React and still compiles and runs beautifully, even if I update the Clojure language version to the current version.

I agree this is a problem, but what "JavaScript" compiler/language technology isn't changing rapidly? 3 years ago we were using JQuery.

Yeah, I balked at changing my apps to be 0.19 compatible. Now I'm kind of just "getting along" with 0.18 until I can do more of my front end work in Phoenix LiveView.

We have a 100 kloc Elm application and the upgrade process was quick. Tracking Elm releases is considerably easier than the JavaScript ecosystem.

Complaining about unstableness, while chasing fads. Thoughts and prayers are with you ;)

In my experience this has not been a problem. First upgrades are very infrequent. Second, they occur for very good reasons. Third there is tooling to handle a lot of the code migration. Fourthly, the compiler will help you fix the rest. Lastly, each new version has been a real improvement on the previous.

I've been lurking Elm for a while, and with Elm 18 came to the conclusion that I should avoid it, because there was a single creator who simply could not keep up, and was uninterested in fostering a healthy community of contributors.

With Elm 19, I changed my mind. A closer following of the community shows that Evan is (a) nice, and (b) interested in contributions, but mostly in a researchy way. More importantly, Elm 19 seemed (to me) to tip the balance in usefulness and cleanliness.

And with the idea of taking Elm straight to WASM (and with WASI around), things are looking interesting in the (eventual… gosh but it moves slowly) future.

tl;dr: It's absolutely worth taking a new look at Elm 19.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com