There's definitely a "the bear is sticky with honey" confusion of discussion over whether it's dead or not. It would be nice for interested strangers like me if they could make some sort of clear statement on it.
I would though. ELM has a very simple, straight forward syntax and everything revolves around the ELM architecture, which makes the whole thing very intuitive. I believe a statically typed and functional language will do just fine without any update for years as long as the initial implementation is done right. Unless there is a need to add some new feature, there is not point in updating the language if all the essentials were well implemented already. ELM compiles to JS and not to a native architecture. It'd be inappropriate to view ELM like one would view languages like C or any that uses LLVM as its backend.
There are bugfix PRs open for years now on the compiler and the core libraries.
> I was very excited for this interview but felt like Evan really didn’t say much of substance and largely avoided the interesting questions
>> It was a total pity party, dude acts like he invented bottled water
>>> Except, no, he doesn't act like that. He did invent something new, though, that is valuable to a lot of people. In spite of this he's still humble; outside of jealousy I'm not sure how you can justify saying he's acting like that. Why did you watch this video? To pick on Evan or Elm?
>>>> And to your insidious question, I reject the premise as neither of your hateful canned options for me fit the bill. You can spend your days defending people you don’t know, I will spend mine critiquing publicly what is obvious: Even thought he’d end up like Van Rossum or Dahl but he forgot the part where your creation brings something new to market—he only brought a new way of creating something that was already in the market (web applications). When will people get it through their skulls that can’t monetize anything if you’re unwilling to let others be involved in your work aside from throwing money at you. It’s completely ridiculous and naive and he’s butt hurt over this realization.
Another thread:
> For my part, the Elm ship has mostly sailed. I can't ignore the fact that the bdfl disappeared for multiple years without notice. That's not how trust is built.
>> i mean did Elm cease to be a perfectly usable language in the interim? what part of the FOSS social contract made you think he was obligated to provide notice?
>>> No one is "obligated" to do anything. I'm not obligated to put in effort to keep in contact with my friends and family, but if I don't I also can't be mad if our relationships drift apart. No, Evan isn't obligated to do anything with Elm that he doesn't want to do, but we also shouldn't be surprised if people question the suitability of a language, if the BDFL just up and disappears. A language isn't a small, one or two file, library that I can just copy paste and fix a bug, if the maintainer isn't reacting to issues or accepting pull requests. And it certainly isn't something that I want to take over the full burden of maintaining. So I need to know that I can, at the very least, work with the maintainers to fix issues as they come up. The view on open source is also extremely negative. Evan was offered a lot of chances to have other people come in and to build a strong core team for Elm. And there are many open source projects (including languages), that operate very successfully around that model and even manage to rotate people out, if they become exhausted with the project. So while I in no way condone attacking Evan directly, it's also fair to acknowledge that there are very good reasons people aren't investing into Elm for their next big project.
This sort of community is part of why I left Elm too, supporters seem to have an immediate knee jerk reaction to any sort of criticism and literally seem to treat Evan as some sort of messiah figure, unreasonable things like, "well, it never said anywhere that people have to give notice" if they're going to have radio silence for 5+ years, like, yeah, but it'd be a good faith effort if they did.
That's not what I see.
The last commits for elm/compiler were minor fixes in 2023. Last substantial changes were in 2021. See https://github.com/elm/compiler/commits/master/
The last commits for elm/core were in the first months of 2021. See https://github.com/elm/core/commits/master/
> It appears the main developer is working on a new thing?
One of the problems is that the developer said several times, even in a recent interview, that he was still working on elm, with a focus on the long term. He gave a few vague hints about his private roadmap. After 4 years without any real public activity, I find it hard to believe there's some private activity.
Sorry for not linking it, just wasn’t sure I wanted a Google Alert, but it seems likely at this point and I don’t mind. I’m somewhat undecided about Elm and Roc. Both are at least innovative.
He also shows up in the comments here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42954103
30 PRs that have been open for a very long time untouched. The point is getting stuff merged into Koka is not easy.