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Comment by scuff3d | Hacker News Reader

Gleam is a great language. It didn't click for me when I was trying it out, but I'm glad to see more people enjoying it.

And I wonder if Gleam + Lustre could become the new Elm.

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As a mostly back end dev Elm looked really nice but all the conflict with the creator and then the lack of compiler releases made me shy away a bit.

I have bumped into "the Elm architecture" in other projects though and it was nice.

Not many people use elm directly but it has influenced the design of so many frameworks and libraries.

Right now I’m toying with the idea of building a GNOME application in rust, and the framework I’m using is relm4 which provides elm like abstractions over gtk-rs.

Previously I’ve built web applications with F# and elmish, which again provides elm like abstractions for building F# applications.

The Roc programing language is being developed because Richard Feldman wanted an Elm like experience in more places then just the front end.

> all the conflict with the creator

Just so no one misunderstands this. The creator (Evan) didn't get into, or start, any drama himself that I ever noticed. I'd argue he's a very chill and nice dude.

I've been on the edges of the community for probably a decade now (lurker), and all of the drama came from other people who simply didn't like the BDFL and slow releases strategy.

Yeah I'm not a front end dev but I do kind of keep track of what's going on in that space. From what I saw it seemed Elm was all but dead. Maybe that's not true, but that was the impression from the outside looking in.

https://iselmdead.info/

I can't believe this is still up tbh. And I can't believe there's still people defending Elm's lack of development

> It’s true that there hasn’t been a new release of the Elm compiler for some time. That’s on purpose: it’s essentially feature-complete.

Last talk I saw by Evan Czaplicki (from the 2025 Scala Days conf) he seemed to be working on some sort of database language https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OtN4iiFBsQ

> And I can't believe there's still people defending Elm's lack of development

Why? (I'm one such person defending Elm's lack of development)

From the outside the project honestly does look kind of dead, what's your take on the development and community?

The project is kind of dead but the community is alive!

I get the sentiment. He feels like everything he wants is there so it doesn't need much more development. But it still feels off.

> the lack of compiler releases

I'm a backend dev mostly and use Elm for all my frontend needs. Yes there are some things compiler-side that could be improved, but basically it's fine.

I appreciate not having to keep up with new releases!

Which conflicts? Gleam seems to be released often?

The elm drama

I recently used Gleam + Lustre for a small app that I normally would have built with Elm + PostgREST. It went very well, and I'm now planning to use it for a larger rewrite (of a rails app).

Anecdotically I recently got into Ruby, via Sinatra, and enjoy the experience.

What are you lacking in ruby and rails, besides the types?

Ruby is lovely. I just prefer static (inferred) types, functional, compiled, and performant languages with managed side effects these days. Bit more upfront effort, but saves a ton of time and stress in the long run.

I've considered playing around with it. Every now and then I tell myself I'm gonna learn front end dev, but as soon as I start looking at it (FE in general not Lustre specifically) I get depressed and give up lol

I far prefer it to javascript or typescript. I recommend using a coding agent to help you learn it (claude code, gemini cli, codex) if you're interested. Pick a smallish project, prompt your way through it, examining to structure and code as you go, asking the agent to explain anything you don't understand.

Probably the most underrated aspect of this new AI age is having a tutor with encyclopedic knowledge available at all times.

* To be clear, I'm not saying to "Vibe Code" it. Take the time to really understand the code, ask questions, and eventually suggest improvements.

I'm confident I can learn it, but the whole ecosystem drives me nuts. It's always a bunch of shit spread across a ton of small file, at least three different "languages" between JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, frameworks or other languages compiled to JavaScript on top of that. Plus the behavior of web browser and trying to wrangle that nonsense.

No disrespect to FE devs. Pretty much all software development is one type of mess or another. But backend and terminals are the kind of mess that make sense to me.

Also, agree that LLMs are actually great for learning if you use them carefully.

> No disrespect to FE devs. Pretty much all software development is one type of mess or another. But backend and terminals are the kind of mess that make sense to me.

This is part of the appeal of Lustre and Elm to me. Not the main thing, but being able to avoid JS land churn (and nulls) is quite nice.

This Lustre? https://www.lustre.org/

Seems to be a filesystem, how would it replace a database?

This one is likely what they were referring to: https://github.com/lustre-labs/lustre

No, this one https://hexdocs.pm/lustre/index.html

I looked at lustre for a recent project and it seems very nice. But the ecosystem is pretty small yet (I could find no examples of auth, for one), so I ended up going with liveview.

I'm hoping it succeeds and gets bigger because I really like its ergonomics.

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