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Comment by dzogchen | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame Elm was abandoned.

Impossible to justify for serious projects at this point.

Would you mind sharing a link / citation for this? Elm releases are intentionally long and the project appears to be ongoing [1].

[1]: https://iselmdead.info/

Edit: moved the position of the citation.

They can proclaim Elm not dead all they want, but if you take a look at the main repo the last commit was over two years ago, and it was to set up an auto reply to PRs that they probably would not get a response.

He works on private branches to avoid speculation and pressure. Example, he gave this presentation yesterday: https://gotoaarhus.com/2023/sessions/2529/elm-on-the-backend

Is iselmdead dead

If people can credibly ask whether something is dead, then the project is dead.

Live projects appear to be alive. There is activity, developers to talk to, support to purchase, release notes to read, even if those release notes are just maintenance notes for mature software. If your evidence of life is pointing to a two year old forum comment, I hate to break it to you, it's dead.

Honestly, even just a tweet from the BDFL twice a year saying 'I still care about this' would be something.

It's impossible to evangelise something when the creator has seemingly taken his ball and gone home.

The idea that enterprise should use Elm is laughable.

People are constantly asking for a pulse:

https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/is-elm-browser-still-mainta...

https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/request-elm-0-19-2-any-upda...

It's pretty sad. I personally believe the ecosystem would be in a much more vibrant state today, if the creator had formally abandoned the language at any point in the past, as there are many who would pick up the torch.

It is telling that several people who could once have been considered 'core team' are now building their own languages:

https://gren-lang.org/

https://www.roc-lang.org/

https://www.derw-lang.com/

I think A) Elm is done, not dead. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." (The JS folks should take a note.) and B) the natural next step is to make Elm-to-native compilers, which is now happening.

I think a lot of programmers get warped views of PL development from over-exposure to the badlands of Javascript. There are languages (like Prolog) that grow like trees, eh?

Mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but the lack of bug fixes imo makes it definitely seem dead. I'm all for stability and sticking to a core vision/set of principles, and agree with your point about the Javascript ecosystem. But not even having small updates to fix bugs here and there doesn't exactly scream "this project is alive but done".

Personally I do believe that the core team are working on things away from the public eye, and that's fair enough in order to keep focus without having to deal with everyone giving their own opinion or criticism. I just wish there was significantly more transparency in the process, and a few bones thrown to the community in the form of fixes.

I think everyone just means something different by dead.

I personally wouldn't use the word until Evan throws in the towel, but he's clearly still onboard. For example, https://gotoaarhus.com/2023/sessions/2529/elm-on-the-backend (yesterday).

I don't think we handle these kinds of oddball cases very gracefully which is evident in basically every HN discussion about Elm. If a language gains traction, then we demand a certain shape of expectations from it, and we're not very good at walking away with just "well, it ain't for me". It's not enough for us to just say that. It's like we have to linger around and ensure everybody else washes their hands of the tool, too.

I'm pretty sure Elm is past the point where anyone who doesn't like the glacial BDFL approach doesn't use it, and those who choose to use it don't care.

Well, I have no particular insight but I heard something about a compiler-to-native code project that might be taking up core team time, or maybe Evan is just burnt out from all the static. I just wish there were fewer people crapping on the kid and more recognition of what he accomplished, and will hopefully accomplish in the future.

The core team refuses to fix straightforward bugs: https://github.com/elm/compiler/issues/1773

Quintessential experience of talking to Elm core team: https://github.com/elm/compiler/issues/1773#issuecomment-418...

What's funny, rtfeldman uses case expression with numbers in his (in OP's blogpost) praised library elm-hex, so it's not the problem of numbers vs variants. Only negative numbers are the problem.

> Elm releases are intentionally long and the project appears to be ongoing [1].

Sounds like a case of the halting problem.

It had so much potential. PureScript is a good alternative with an active community and democratic development process.

The successor to Elm is probably “Elmish” for F#, which is a bit less opinionated. It can interop with any JS code so it’s a safer bet.

Gren is trying to be a successor too: https://gren-lang.org/

That's what we are using right now in production. But the main benefit on this case is that we also can use the same language on the server and devops.

Is elm dead?

Elm isn't dead the same way Yahoo isn't dead. It's around but it isn't gaining new traction, features, mindshare.

I think it's a great language that people should explore for fun and learning. I think it was horribly mismanaged from a public relations perspective and at one point in time had a real shot at becoming a lot larger than where it will stay from now on.

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