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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

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vbezhenar

So elm is abandoned or there's more to this story?

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You'll see people arguing that it's not, but I'll let you be the judge.

https://elm-lang.org/news

https://github.com/elm/compiler/pulse/monthly

https://github.com/elm/core/pulse/monthly

https://github.com/elm/compiler/commits/master

https://github.com/elm/core/commits/master

Also:

https://gotoaarhus.com/2023/sessions/2529/elm-on-the-backend

https://elm.studio

https://thestrangeloop.com/2023/the-economics-of-programming...

There's more to the story in that Elm is a stable, high-quality frontend language that works as well as its creator wants it to for now. There are a lot of happy Elm users over on the Elm Slack, and it's being used in production at various companies.

There's also [Elm on the Backend](https://gotoaarhus.com/2023/sessions/2529/elm-on-the-backend), a recent talk given by the creator of Elm, about his experiments in using Elm as a full-stack language. There are some notes and a few photos, but no video as far as I'm aware.

I'm not involved in the Elm community nor do I write it for a living though, so I'm only kind of aware of what's going on over in the Elm world.

I saw the Elm on the Backend presentation. Evan would like ELM to be a full stack language. If it will work properly, you will not have to manage the message passing (JSON, XML). Seems like very interesting topic. Evan looked really psyched about.

From elm.studio:

"We are bringing the simplicity and friendliness of Elm to hosting. No configuration. Just press publish."

And from the About Page on elm.studio:

"The ultimate goal is to produce a fun and simple programming language, with the kind support and camaraderie of people who like what we do and how we do it."

Very little information about what is the next step in Elm's life, or even whether they've actually left it... I guess the upcoming talk on StrangeLoop[1] may clear things up... his description on that talk hints at what he's up to:

"He lives in Denmark, working alongside his wife at elm.studio to keep Elm independent and interesting."

Elm may still be alive, just not publically for now.

EDIT: just found this while looking for more information:

https://iselmdead.info/

[1] https://thestrangeloop.com/2023/the-economics-of-programming...

> Why is it a good thing that Elm doesn’t get frequent updates? First of all, it means your code will last a long time! It also means the language is very stable, because features are carefully thought out before being implemented.

What an absolute clown car.

Actually I think that's a reasonable stance. Not everyone wants to use the newest and greatest JavaScript framework which is will be completely reworked in six months because there's a need for a newer and greatester version. The speed of evolution of JavaScript frameworks is amazing, yet they're all still worse thought out than Elm.

On the other hand, this comment shows the clown car of HN discourse: everything that doesn’t make the trade offs that you want is a literal dumpster fire end of discussion.

But bugs have to be fixed. You can't claim that popular non-trivial project is alive without constant commits. Even if no new features are added. I can see many issues about compiler crashes, etc. Sounds like not mature project.

That’s fine, but that’s just your opinion. A lot of people use Elm in production and don’t have issues with it. I’m neutral on Elm. I think it’s a cool language but I don’t use it. I’m not convinced that “constant commits” signal the life of a project though.

It’s abandoned

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