Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

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That website justifies Elm's release cycle by saying that the language evolves slowly and that's a good thing, but you and they are conflating the bug fix release cycle with the feature release cycle.

I don't think people would be saying Elm is dead if there were regular bug fix patches coming out and we were on v0.19.21. The reason why people are declaring Elm dead isn't because new features haven't been added in two and a half years, it's because there hasn't been a bug fix update in two and a half years.

Sure, the language is stable in that it doesn't change, but stable can also mean bug-free, and Elm is certainly not stable enough to justify going that long without a single bug fix.

Yes, you are correct that bug fix release cycle and feature release cycle are different. If I felt that the majority of criticisms and comments were about bugs, I wouldn't have felt compelled to respond in this way. Perhaps I've misjudged that.

I will admit that the bug list is extremely disheartening. I have personally never come across them in the wild, but I don't doubt that when they do come up they are a horrible roadblock and the burgeoning set of community tools to work around this is telling.

There are probably people out there who think that a language should change more rapidly, but I think most people just take a quick glance at when the last release or commit was and judge that it's someone's hobby project that they've long abandoned.

Which is more or less true, given that Evan never let anyone else fully participate.

Yeah, I think that's exactly the attitude I want to push back on.

There's also a difference between language features, and std library or browser API features.

I'm fine with Elm-the-language as it is, but I would definitely have preferred for a stdlib not to expose a function that are just a TODO.

I still use and enjoy the language, mostly because everything else in browserland is a pit of despair for me, but I could see some quality pull requests being merged once in a while.

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