Comment by salimmadjd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by salimmadjd | Hacker News Reader

I believe Elm took some major missteps. Despite doing so many things right with the initial designs (and still one of the best designed front-end experiences) it never grew much beyond the early adopters and it basically remained a fun hobby language.

I criticized the basic lack of communication and the infrequent updates in r/elm (I believed these infrequent updates were going to kill the momentum of Elm). I was concerned that it made the language seem stagnant.

Immediately, after posting it was clear it was a major concern by others as well. So what did Evan do with that criticism? He spent the opening part of his European talk mocking it [0].

I didn’t take it personally, but it illustrated the kind of mindset Evan has. A good leader would have asked questions about why many feel that way and would have instituted a process for more frequent updates. It became clear to me, outside of being brilliant at designing Elm he is not the person to take it to the next level of adoption. If it’s not moderately adopted it won’t make sense recommending it for any production project, even if it does many things right.

To me it feels like (sadly) Elm will just be a hobby project despite what it could have been.

[0] https://youtu.be/uGlzRt-FYto

I also eventually came to the conclusion that elm Will be forever niche and can’t become a mainstream language.

I agree with so much of what Evan says in principle, but every time the project development style is criticized, someone pastes a link of Evan basically telling everyone to sit down, shut up, and wait. Which is Evan’s right, but rhetorically speaking, this is horrible. Just a little charm can go such a long way.

He's quite charming in person, FWIW, and he has great language design sensibility.

I don't doubt it. FWIW, I was really impressed with Elm the language.

But I don't see how their current messaging can possibly be working for Elm's benefit. It feels like the PL equivalent of a politician who refuses to shake hands or take selfies. I don't think it requires Elm or Evan to make any technical compromises just to be a little less off-putting.

I have met both Evan and Richard, having been a member of the SF Elm Meetup group. My experiences have shown me that they are both deeply empathetic individuals who are very methodical in their approach to improving the language.

Evan spends every Meetup exclusively focused on attendees who've no it's very little experience with the language, basically giving them a personal guided tour. In these sessions here is very kind and patient - and a skilled teacher.

Richard is friendly as well and does a great job communicating the vendors of Elm's design and how best to take advantage of it. He is also a senior practitioner who writes Elm on a daily basis.

NoRedInk is truly powered by Elm, and that has helped them hire very easily despite not having tons of cash to throw around (they make education software).

So at the end of the day, I've come to view them as true believers in a very particular vision for the language. It is compelling, especially when walked through it by Evan. But they have a lot personally on that vision.

In many ways, they view themselves as taking the long slow road to what will be the "UI language of the future". They want many people to try the language and see the benefits of immutability, purity, and declarative UI. They want people to follow their lead and use those principles in using Elm in their projects.

But in their eyes, Elm is not done. They have no interest in people coming in and suggesting that Elm should be something else. At times, that's lead to some rash behavior that looks bad. But as practical as Elm is for many projects it is not Pragmatic. And that turns people off.

And if it turns you off, I'd leave Elm off your list of choices for a language in your production projects...for now.

It is yet to be seen if Evan's vision will succeed in it's goal of making functional, declarative, strongly typed UI programming "mainstream". But he's proven that he is committed to that vision regardless of a large host of workaday engineers asking him to compromise in some way.

Maybe some day, custom operators come back. Maybe some day there will be type classes. But I can guarantee that day won't come until the vision is complete and you see Elm 1.0

PS: I fully empathize with the people turned off by this approach by the way, but I can't help but truly appreciate someone doggedly standing firm on their design principles and seeing it though despite it costing them an opportunity at widespread fame. I have no long term contact with the Elm core team, and no projects using Elm currently. Maybe when I see 1.0 :-)

> But in their eyes, Elm is not done

I think this is one of the major themes of all the 'Elm dramas' that we have been reading and hearing about. Elm core team should stop recommending it as a stable platform that people can try out (which Elm clearly is not).

I've personally never seem them say "the language is done, you can expect no breaking changes". Hence the fact that it is v0.19

I have read several times that they do not consider the language stable. Yet they repeatedly advertise it as «production-ready» [1,2], which is contradictory at best.

[1] https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/two-experiences-with-elm/91...

[2] https://github.com/gdotdesign/elm-github-install/issues/62#i...

> the language is done, you can expect no breaking changes

Well ... I don't use Elm in production. But, I'm sure there are people out there who got gaslighted because of this ill-conceived move, and they can better explain about 'production readiness' story that was weaved around Elm.

> Hence the fact that it is v0.19

I also don't understand how can a minor version 0.18 -> 0.19 completly break backwards compatibility even if it is not stable. Well may be it's just Elm. They should have atleast thrown a `deprecated` warning and maintain backwards compatibilty till the next major version.

It's in line with semantic versioning, point 4 [1]:

> Major version zero (0.y.z) is for initial development. Anything MAY change at any time. The public API SHOULD NOT be considered stable.

1. https://semver.org/#semantic-versioning-specification-semver

> Major version zero (0.y.z) is for initial development

> Anything MAY change at any time.

Thank you for clarification. So, now it begs the question how did Elm team persuaded people to try out their language in production if it is still in initial development and anything MAY change at any time ...

Sounds like that’s a complete facade though. Plenty of people are overly polite because it inflates their ego to be perceived as polite.

And the article isn’t talking about politeness so much as openness. Which, the Elm team seems very very closed off.

>Plenty of people are overly polite because it inflates their ego to be perceived as polite.

Can you point me to some article or rigorous paper that would help me take this claim seriously?

I think the idea that most people are nice to some people, and not nice to others is a generally accepted premise.

>I think the idea that most people are nice to some people, and not nice to others is a generally accepted premise.

Nothing I said implied I disagreed with that "premise" and it seems bizarre how what I did say could somehow lead to your non sequitur of an answer. At any rate, what should have been obvious I was taking exception to was the idea that "plenty of people are overly polite because it inflates their ego to be perceived as polite." That comes across as reductive. The same argument could be used to criticize anyone's motivations for practically anything and anything's opposite. So and so does x because it inflates their ego to be perceived as doing x or so and so is overly impolite because it feeds their ego to be perceived as someone with a gruff demeanor. It's too easy so I was looking for some kind of article that at least made a convincing argument for its application in at least this specific context. I'm still waiting.

Like you said, anyone's motivation for their actions can be questioned. Everyone's motives are questionable. I don't think an article is needed to argue about that. I, personally, am kind to many people just because it is troublesome not to be, or to extract specific behaviors as a return. I managed to get a driving license without bribing (bribing for that is standard practice here), because I was so overly polite and non aggressive during training that my instructor genuinely believed I was one of the few pure souls left on this planet. The instructor then managed to persuade the examiner of my driving test that the reason I was not paying was because I was naive and really thought I could drive making zero mistakes, not because I was trying to get away with it ( if you don't bribe, a single tiny mistake is enough to get cut, and you can't really avoid it if the examiner wishes, also the examiner and the instructor share the bribe). That saved me about 150 euros. That's politeness ft or you.

I'm frankly not buying this lazy argument. The assertion that "plenty of people are overly polite because it inflates their ego to be perceived as polite" is bullshit. In it's general form it's no more than a convenient tool to disparage those you don't like. Dislike a person but lack a rational or socially acceptable way to criticize them? Easy, just use this prebaked phrasing to cast any exhibited behavior negatively. Imagine somebody doesn't like happy/serious/polite/flirty/whatever people. Then to them happy/serious/polite/flirty/whatever people are just acting happy/serious/polite/flirty/whatever to be perceived that way as an ego boost. It's an absurdly reductive cynical word game when you need to hate but can't come up with anything substantive. The argument's unprovability short of mind reading and its applicableness to anything (and anything's opposite!) removes any intellectual rigor as it careers completely over the side of "proving" too much. Vacuous rhetorical flourish trotted out in the middle of discussion to target anything the opponent says or does as mere self-aggrandizement. Seductive if one goes for that kind of sophistry however the reality of human motivation does not resemble this arbitrarily contrived model of, to echo the GP, ego inflation. Here's the real reason people seem "overly" polite: a combination of cultural norms, fear, being non-confrontational, and power dynamics. As simple as it is.

I know that some people are willing to go through much mental gymnastics to justify hate and derision while seeing themselves as virtuous but had no idea this mean spirited belief pattern was at all pervasive here, however this discussion has led me to revise that belief. It's sickening but rather than continue to get worked up I'll just log out for another 6 month hiatus like I've done before when this community gets a little too high off its own farts. Hopefully things will be better, folks a little less stir crazy in October. Later.

> Immediately, after posting it was clear it was a major concern by others as well. So what did Evan do with that criticism? He spent the opening part of his European talk mocking it [0].

I just watched that segment. He argued his position with a satirical touch. A summary of his position that characterizes him as "mocking critics" is inaccurate, imo.

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