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Comment by cercatrova | Hacker News Reader

Who among us is still using Elm (other than this company)? I thought most would have stopped after the creator's holier-than-thou attitude [0], publicly shaming critics [1], only allowing certain people (read: core contributors) to use language features without monkey patching, and generally acting like only they know how to make a good language so everyone else should just sit down and shut up [2].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821447

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22824899

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510267

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We are silent legion. We have no runtime errors, we don't cry, we don't collect github stars, nor fancy logos for packages.

There has been nothing even close to Elm for building stable and maintainable projects! I am using it for 5+ years now, and since 0.19.1 came out my life became so much easier and straight forward. It works as advertised, its fast, its clean.

Saying this unironicly it kind of sounds like a cult.

Or they don’t care about the politics of a tool and instead use it because they get things done.

People who love drama seem to hate to see it.

I'd always been curious about it but never really took the plunge. How well does it scale? Have you built any significantly complex applications with it?

I work on the app mentioned in the podcast. It is roughly 600k lines of Elm. I have previously worked at bigger, more well known companies, on apps 1/3 the size if not smaller. I've seen more frequent, and more reliable refactors in this Elm code than any I've worked in before. I'd easily take 1M lines of Elm over 100k lines of any JS framework, and I've worked with most of them.

I use it at my current job (they've used it for a few years now) and for my personal projects (mostly game jams).

Tbh, idgaf what Evan thinks of me or anyone else. The more you nemesize him, the more people will messianize him. It's best to divorce creators from their products.

I will admit I vehemently disagree with his apparent categorical dismissal of CSS features like custom properties, but discordant opinions are not going to stop me from using my preferred front end development platform.

You spammed this exact same comment 5 days ago on another thread. [0]

>Who is still using Elm? I thought most would have stopped after the creator's holier-than-thou attitude [0], publicly shaming critics [1], only allowing certain people (read: core contributors) to use language features without monkey patching, and generally acting like only they know how to make a good language so everyone else should just sit down and shut up [2].

>[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22821447

>[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22824899

>[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510267

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33101786#33103338

There was no response on that thread. I wanted to see what people actually think of Elm these days, which is why I asked in this thread too.

It whips ass

Seems more like a vendetta where you look for opportunities to post your epic “dunk”. I mean, how does it matter to you who uses Elm?

The politics itself affects how I use Elm. If the creator who is the BDFL doesn't want to provide features that other frameworks do, and moreover shames people for suggesting them, that does not inspire much confidence in me that I should use it in production, so I don't. I thought something might have changed, but it appears it has not, so I will continue not using it.

Permutive, where I work, is using Elm for its product frontend.

GWI has some hundreds of thousands of lines of Elm in its flagship product as well.

I wasn't aware of any of that. And most of it is irrelevant to my question, but what keeps a fork project from being made of Elm to sidestep disagreements like this?

Nothing. And the reason no one has done it is because these links being brought up each time elm is discussed is irrelevant for us actually using elm. Things work fine.

They have! Gren is a new fork. First commit was the head of the elm compiler repo. Excited to see what happens with it.

FWIW Evan (author of Elm) has explicitly said a fork is absolutely fine if it has a different enough name.

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