You're entitled to your opinion, of course, and you articulated it well. But again I see it as another example of someone not liking being told "no", no?
Obviously Elm is his passion project, that's fine. But nobody who locks down their compiler on a supposedly "open source" project can actually seriously expect others to engage with that in good faith.
Furthermore, the absolute state of just trying to modify Elm to be more fit for purpose is horrendous. Every time I see a parallel implementation or a fork, the author has to bend over backward with platitudes to placate the Elm masses and ensure them that this project isn't trying to "split the community," which is a nonsense idea to start with imo.
It feels cultish, on top of a project that is actively hostile to people who want to use it any way other than how the BDFL has mandated its usage. If you want to say the problem is with the users, that's fine, but that's exactly the attitude keeping me from ever engaging. I personally think the problem is with the people who want such fine control over their technology and community, as opposed to understanding that they can really only shepherd their implementation. That's about as far as their reach rightfully extends.
EDIT: also, the fact that they aggressively lock down their compiler and have such hostility to anyone working in parallel is imo the definition of "holding it back"
My complaint isn't that you or anyone doesn't engage with Elm, that's your prerogative, of course.
My problem is that a small segment of people do engage with it whenever it comes up to smear the project in general or Evan in particular for nothing worse than wanting to run his own project his own way.
He's not an ogre? I mean here he is, look, he semms nice enough to me? "The Economics of Programming Languages" by Evan Czaplicki (Strange Loop 2023) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8
What I usually see are warnings about what happened to the project and how it is run, mostly targeted to the unaware. This is a sign of respect to people's time before they waste it on something that might disappoint them when they get to know the details.
Look, I get it, I'm still sore about Google Feed Reader, 'member that?
But enough is enough. It's old news. Get over it. Etc.
It's like if every time someone mentioned Caddy server there was someone bringing up that time Matt Holt put that header in and pissed off a bunch of people. Life goes on. We forgive and let things go.
It's high time for folks to forgive Evan for his mistakes. I mean, he's very young still, eh? Cut the guy some slack already?
When I propose a tool to my CTO I couldn't care less about the project's leadership personal choices.
Mature engineers think in terms of ROI, dependability, bus factor, predictability, funding, mind-share, hiring ease, license, etc.
But it would be naive and unprofessional of me to handwave technical issues with the tools. And ALL tools have hard edges and undesirable characteristics.
And putting a header in a HTTP server is not proportional as restricting who can change the source code of a compiler.
Matt Holt is awesome btw. And so is Elm author.