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Comment by 7thaccount | Hacker News Reader

I never understand people's frustrations until I hear 50k loc base lol. That sounds hard in any language. I'd guess Tcl is pretty awesome if you keep things around 1000 loc or below (i.e. scripting).

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> That sounds hard in any language.

Yes, it is hard in many languages, having experienced it first hand. Just wanted to point out my experience with Elm (I know) 200k loc, I can refactor the codebase fearlessly, knowing that once it compiles it will "mostly" just work.

I fondly remember porting Elm 0.18 to 0.19, which was a big change in the language itself and the libs, me and my co-worker working across time zones almost 24/7 for over a week to make the damn thing compile, it was like struggling in the darkness, unable to see "anything" in the browser for like 7 days and when it finally compiled.. it mostly just worked!

It's sad that to see Elm getting so much negative publicity, but I do enjoy working every day on it.

Last I checked Elm was getting negative publicity not because of the language itself (heard a lot of good things about that) but because of the leadership?

Correct. Elm's publicity issues stem from how closed off the leadership is. There's Evan (creator) and a handful of trusted others that have a huge amount of sway over how the language and, arguably more importantly, the core libraries develop. They also get special access to write libraries that rely on native JS code (something you can't do as of 0.19 even locally in your own projects).

Elm is a great language and I've written extensively[1] about how nice it is to use in production. But if you want to get involved in the community, it feels like there's not much to get involved in. The fact that even on the Elm Discourse[2], posts auto-lock after 10 days means that the forum is now pretty dead compared to what it used to be in 2018-2019.

[1] https://charukiewi.cz/posts/elm/

[2] https://discourse.elm-lang.org/

I have the same feeling with Swift. I did a refactor recently w/o really thinking about it, just fixing (compilation) errors as they happened, and it just worked on first try.

In something like C# or Java with a good ide I imagine it's not too bad.

Interpreted languages like Python and JavaScript do suffer when code bases reach a certain size.

Even adding half-baked, not compile/runtime checked types such as "Python's Type annotations", "Python's Type Stubs", "Javascript @type-infused-jsdocs" and "Javascript with Typescript Declaration Files" manages to make those modern IDEs a lot smarter for things like checking if you're doing really obvious bad things until you go really ham into metaprogramming.

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