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Comment by brokencode | Hacker News Reader

Yeah Elm has had a very strange arc, but I think calling it a research language is right.

There was a period where it was heavily evangelized. Many blog posts were written and talks given, and there was a lot of enthusiasm and adoption.

Then the author just kind of disappeared and the project stalled.

Which of course he had a right to do since it’s his project, but I think he should have set expectations better from the beginning.

The heavy evangelism helped spread the ideas, but also set up developers to feel blindsided and abandoned.

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> Then the author just kind of disappeared and the project stalled.

There was more to the story than that. They made some major breaking changes in v0.19 that broke a lot of apps and left no path for them to continue with Elm, then dug their heels in when the community protested.

If you had an app at your company that used the features they decided not to allow any more, you either had to start deciding which fork to follow or start planning to rewrite your app in something else.

That evangelism turned into an uncomfortable gaslighting where half of the community was trying to tell you that this change was what was best for the language and that you didn’t really need that feature anyway.

There were several forks but I don’t know if any got traction. It felt like an already small community was fracturing into even smaller communities right after alienating a lot of people.

What feature is that?

One form of JavaScript interop. Instead of being able to write bindings directly to native code, you had to pass messages through "ports" instead.

https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/native-code-in-0-19/826

Personally, I was sad to see signals and FRP go in 0.17

https://elm-lang.org/news/farewell-to-frp

Lots of things were disallowed in 0.19, but probably the most disruptive were that custom native modules were disallowed (which basically means that, only certain official packages would now be allowed to directly call native JavaScript), and the package manager was locked down (which means that you can only install packages from the official elm repository, not GitHub or anywhere else).

You can still indirectly call native JavaScript, in a message-passing kind of way (via Ports or custom elements) but these changes were still really disruptive to many codebases.

On top of the already-mentioned JS interop breakage, Elm 0.19 also dropped native Websocket support[0]. The API had issues (fair), so it was dropped rather than improving it due to wanting to do it perfectly (okay, I guess), buuut due to the JS interop restrictions this meant that 3rd-party experiments or alternatives were impossible (??), which meant that any use of Websockets was in practice now completely impossible! If I recall correctly something similar happened to other core libraries.

This "nobody is allowed to do this until Evan himself has made time to come up with a blessed solution" style of development left a lot of people quite disappointed. Elm was marketed quite heavily as the best thing since sliced bread and the future of front-end web development, but in reality it turned out to be just Evan's toy language which you could look at but weren't allowed to touch. Which is of course allowed, but it does rapidly kill any kind of community around it.

[0]: https://github.com/elm-lang/websocket

This really overstates the problem and situation.

Synchronous interop was removed from Elm. That sucks for synchronous stuff and anything too trivial to be worth async interop.

But async interop is still available. Anything networked, like websockets, is a natural fit for async interop. i.e. a Send(Req) | Recv(Res) port.

It's fine to be mad that a "BDFL" decided on a different set of trade-offs than your preference, but that's what happened.

It's also a learning lesson for people who thought that a tiny, pre-v1.0 ecosystem that already had breaking changes would never break again especially in a way they disagree with. I think it's time to just accept the lesson.

I'm not mad, I'm disappointed. Elm was quite promising prior to this, but 0.19 essentially killed it.

And the problem isn't just that sync interop was removed. That would've been fine. It's the double-whammy of 1) killing sync interop, 2) making async interop libs impossible, 3) still allowing it for "blessed" libraries, and 4) gaslighting everyone else that they were Holding It Wrong.

Breakage is totally fine, I never expected anything different from Elm. But community-killing permanent core feature removal is a bit much, is it not?

I luckily never invested too deeply into the ecosystem so there wasn't a lot dor me to "learn", but it sure ruined any chances of me - and with me I bet a lot of other people - ever looking at an Elm 1.0 or Elm++, and considering the valuable insights gained from TEA that really is a shame.

Don't fret it. Many of us were in the same boat. Evan can do whatever he wants, but we can also call it out when it's wrong.

I personally made the same decision. It became very clear to me that Elm was not the foundation for me to build a business on.

> Evan can do whatever he wants, but we can also call it out when it's wrong.

IIRC you couldn't, and would be banned on any channels for questioning decisions

We've been calling him out for YEARS. Half the comments on this article are people calling him out. He can't escape it.

> It's also a learning lesson for people who thought that a tiny, pre-v1.0 ecosystem that already had breaking changes would never break again especially in a way they disagree with. I think it's time to just accept the lesson.

This gives flashbacks of the last time I discussed this 7 years ago: Even trying to bring it up would bring denial that it was a problem. It was your fault for using it wrong. If you could demonstrate the cases where it continued to be a problem, it was still your fault for using the project.

Even the pre-1.0 projects I use that have breaking changes will announce a transition period and gradually deprecate APIs over several releases. Community feedback is monitored and the deprecated API may be kept longer than originally planned until suitable alternatives can be produced. Elm wouldn't even consider any of these.

The direction of the argument also changes based on the situation. When Elm was dropping breaking changes in 0.19 the story was that it's a fast changing pre-1.0 project and it was our fault for not expecting breaking changes.

Then they went 7 years without a release and the argument became that Elm was so stable that it was our fault for expecting updates to a mature and stable project.

I think you are taking the wrong lesson. The lesson is not "things make break." Many languages break things. Haskell has made it a feature, not a bug.

But this change did more than break things. It meant people using Elm in production had to abandon it, nearly immediately, as all future work would first require them to port the whole stack, in one fell swoop, to Elm (and this was before tail recursion modulo cons was implemented, but recursion was forced).

Imagine if, in Rust's infancy, it decided to remove the C FFI with the argument that people should instead, naturally, rewrite that code in Rust. What would have happened? People would have abandoned it in droves, and it would have been essentially relegated to a research language, never again suited for prime time.

And -- oh, look what happened to Elm!

Elm was better without custom kernel modules and sync JS-interop.

It kept the Elm kernel small and portable. It forced the 3rd party package eco system to innovate and create things rather than just wrap existing Javscript libraries.

It has enable me to port the small kernel now to C++ for an Elm to native compiler.

Also, if you really wanted to bypass it and have your own kernel, that was always possible and not hard to do. Even in 0.18 custom effects modules could not be shared on the official package site.

> Elm was better without custom kernel modules and sync JS-interop.

That may be true, but what would have been even better is never having the feature, as opposed to adding it, allowing many people to become dependent on it, and then taking it away. (Like everyone else, I'm not claiming Evan should not be able to make such changes -- just that making such changes will breed predictable resentment.)

> It kept the Elm kernel small and portable.

This is a good thing.

> It forced the 3rd party package eco system to innovate and create things rather than just wrap existing Javscript libraries.

This is a bad thing, presented as a good thing. Boring as it may be, if wrapping an existing piece of working code does the job with no downsides then it's always better to do that than reimplement it for reimplementation's sake.

Custom kernel never was a feature the language had. It was an implementation detail that people discovered they could hack, but it was never meant as a feature.

It doesn't matter how good a language is in theory if people using it for practical purposes end up having to abandon it.

> It forced the 3rd party package eco system to innovate and create things rather than just wrap existing Javscript libraries.

Writing everything yourself is not innovation. It's busy work.

Sure it's a good way to learn a language, but when you just want to build an app why would you build yet another searchable select when there are more than enough JS options already available....

IMHO this busywork is (mostly) preferrable, because it meant that any package was truly pure Elm, and you could blindly trust it not to be some wrapper that crashed at runtime.

It's a tradeoff, sure. But this way, Elm didn't become just another "JavaScript with better syntax".

For a non-fork that has appeared recently, Sky: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662116

It's vibe-coded (hmmm), Elm syntax, server-side, SSE, compiles to Go, Go FFI, TEA, web/cli/TUI/desktop targets, consistent Db, Ui - a lot of things to like if it all comes together.

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