What does that mean?
I know they have a strict vision of what features are better left out, and in a way I wish more langs'd be vocal about that. Go does the same and they seem to get a lot of praise for it.
Just like in Go, the Elm team only allows some features to be used by their own (std-) libraries. This, again, is a design choice.
No group was hurt enough to "fork" Elm. PureScript can be seen as a close relative that is less restrictive.
The Elm developers have a history of ostracizing people who even mention the possibility of forks from the community; tester89 posted a link with a lot of good context.
They take a very heavy handed and adversarial stance to development. I had just started getting into Elm when the news of .19 basically breaking everything and the core team just brushing off peoples cries and it soured me on the entire language.
When pre-v1 Go broke things, `go fix` was there to at least try and help.
We weren't bit by the removal of native/kernel code, but it definitely turned a lot of people away that may have been committed to Elm before.
We also ported our Elm codebase from 0.18 to 0.19. It took us almost a week working almost 24/7 across two timezones to make the damn thing compile again. Did not see the UI for the entire week, but once it compiled it (mostly) just worked like nothing had changed (that's after 429 files changed, 16422 insertions(+), 12116 deletions(-)).
My colleague took notes of the progress at https://gist.github.com/mordrax/efcd34739ed56bb64d2b12d2401b...
> We have until Friday 7th September to upgrade to Elm 0.19.
I'm completely ignorant about the transition, but I'm curious what the source of this deadline was. Would you mind expanding?
At our company it was much less drastic. At the time we had about 35kloc of Elm and it took me one evening of Vim macro frenzy. The trickiest things we encountered were an elm/http API change and temporarily vendoring packages that didn't yet upgrade themselves.
I'm not defending Elm team members being rude. But when I look at Elm I see a much better designed language than Go, run by a much smaller team. Elm changes quite minor things in pre-1.0. Go forgot that polymorphism is cool, nulls are bad, etc. Now Go wants to fix some of that, but that would create a new notion of idiomatic Go that it's std lib is not in sync with.
To some extend this is a fate all popular languages befall. Look at Java for some sci-fi, or even better C++.
This is unnecessarily dramatic, and far from the truth.
Their mind will be blown, probably.
Not calling you out or anything, but could you give a reference on that? I'm curious about what they're doing with a "DRM" in the compiler.
Check tester89 link - it’s the description about the state of Elm right now. Author’s experience matches my personal one.
Essentially, the compiler only allows packages published by two official Elm Github organizations to include native code. I'm not sure what the process is if a key "native" feature is missing, as this limitation also drove me away from the language.
[0] https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/native-code-in-0-19/826
You're more than welcome to create a fork, as long as you name it something else. This is so people are not confused as to what they are getting into! :)