If you think a cult of personality is bad, you aren’t appreciating how much worse is, to the rest of us, the cult of anti-cheerleaders on every post that mentions Elm.
For years now any time someone wants to read about Elm, they have to hear from the same few HNers who don’t even use it yet refuse to let it go.
It’s like every time Dune plays in the movie theater, the same crowd comes in to explain how shit it is, how different it is from the book, in fact check out this ancient blog post about how bad it is, and there’s no way yall in the audience will enjoy it so don’t even try! The director sucks too, just look what he did! He fkin did that! It’s actually impossible to enjoy the movie once you know all the facts. And the guy who made the movie didn’t listen to my meticulous feedback and it hurt me cuz boy do I have opinions about how a Dune movie should be made, believe you me.
Meanwhile we just want to watch the dang movie.
I am not seeking out opportunities to badmouth Elm. But as I am someone who is interested in FP and frontend tech in general, when I see an Elm story on the frontpage I click on it to see what folks are saying. And when I see exclusively glowing and positive statements (which was the case when I first posted) then I feel like I have an obligation to point out that there are some big issues with how Elm is maintained, because this is the sort of thing that _I_ would want to know before I spent a bunch of time digging into it.
If you want to watch the dang movie go ahead. But anyone asserting that those of us posting negative things about Elm are acting cult-like (seriously?) is being disingenuous. Considering the audience, there are good reasons to highlight the--IMHO major--problems with how the Elm project is run, and not mentioning them is irresponsible.
Elm's maintaners decided to break this. They created what amounts to a caste system for code. If your code was blessed, then it got all sorts of extra abilities not granted to un-blessed code. And the sole authority on blessing was the cadre of developers.
Now, as to why they did this is a different discussion. There are good and bad arguments on both side. But as to why it comes up all the time? Ego
It's like this meme. https://imgur.com/a/mjsMOGJ why do so many want to be the person to the left when it comes to elm? And so many years later?
Maybe a better question to be curious about is this: What can Elm do about the (self-evident in these comments, IMO) fact that a bunch of devs who really like it, feel like it's a bad choice? And, what SHOULD Elm do about that?
If a bunch of people think it's a tool foreboding enough to warn others off of it, and in the same thread some of those same people are saying they really liked that tool and wish they didn't have to do that, what benefit are you really getting from just dismissing their feedback?
Outspoken feedback is rare, just calling it negativity and paying it no mind rhymes a lot with the way Elm, writ large, has behaved. It's not indicative of a tool or ecosystem that wants to foster growth or continue development. That's part of the problem.
I'm curious about why the same few, a vocal minority, spams every thread about elm with the same blog post. If you think we're dismissive, it's more because we don't want the discussion to be derailed for the umpteenth time.
And if you are thinking of starting now, you should not focus on what undocumented feature (or hack) was taken away in 2018 that allowed injecting arbitrary JavaScript code that easily broke all guarantees of the language https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/native-code-in-0-19/826 but rather if Elm fits your current (and maybe future) needs. If it does not, keep looking for alternatives.
I have some five or so projects written in Elm and enjoy every time I don't have to upgrade them because no new version was released!
The only fear I have is that I won't be able to install packages that no longer exist when I switching machines.
But by running
ELM_HOME="$PWD/deps" elm make ...