Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by popara 2259 days ago
When I decided to commit my project to Elm, back in 2017, I have seen all those writings on the wall. Basically I am buying in someone's whim. One caveat is that I can stop following his whim, freeze source code that I need and carry on my development with out needing or caring about future releases, ie, I do the dreadful fork.

I work alone so I choose my tech destiny.

But when you look at the guy at which will you are submitting to, and can't but say he is the everything I want from a COMPILER MASTER. He have designed clean and well working language and ecosystem around it.

This is the ecosystem where you are not afraid that one of library's dependencies might install crypto miner or steal your user data.

You are sure with like 99.99999....% that you won't have errors in runtime.

And language is simple, my wife started writing it, you only need to know to structure the code and all the frontend power is to you.

Ad hominem - also Evan is soft spoken guy that cares about his life's work, and sharing it with others.

Ad hominem on my side - I am sick of ALGOL languages. After 12 years of proffesional work with many different languages, touching JS or anything related gave me head aches, such inherently stupid and inefficient ways of building systems, from syntax to /ways of doing things/ and making sure they are /allright/.

Luke may have different ambitions than me, I wanted to build reliable systems that brought me money, for me, after 3 years of Elm, I am happy as I can be.

I build new features with confidence and speed. It took me 3 days of work to switch to 0.19. I have deleted big chunks of JS that I though were necessary in order for my app to work. But I was wrong, there were pure way to do it. That was rewarding mental exercise for me, after which I had cleaner code, and customers noticed performance improvements.

Can language /be better/? Yes.

Is Elm at the point where think it desperately needs some improvement, because of which my work is blocked or stalled? No. It wasn't like that since 0.19.

Luke is off and rude in this post at least. He is considered about the posture of OSS not the real benefits of it. Why Luke didn't came up with big blog post about the features he would like to see in Elm? Much more constructive than bitching about it.

3 comments

> Luke is off and rude in this post at least.

I found him humble, self-aware, forgiving, and kind

> Why Luke didn't came up with big blog post about the features he would like to see in Elm? Much more constructive than bitching about it.

I think you may have missed one of, if not the, fundamental point of the post. Even if he did (which he did at times), it would've been pointless.

Please, if you find a link to constuctive Luke's criticism, please post it, I am willing to change my mind.
> Luke is off and rude in this post at least. He is considered about the posture of OSS not the real benefits of it. Why Luke didn't came up with big blog post about the features he would like to see in Elm? Much more constructive than bitching about it.

Sounds like he has done a lot of talking about features he would like to see (as well as work to realise them), and gotten nothing but dismissal and inaction for it. I think this blog post is probably the most constructive thing left he could do.

I would disagree with this, just on the basis that I have been following elm/compiler for a long time, and all the github discussions.

To me Luke, always went in with comments like a zealous OSS knight, which wants to make a contribution so hard.

If you list his blog posts and github comments you will see that there is no constructive critique of technology but rather their way of handling and communicating stuff.

I haven't run to that kind of issues, because I didn't insist do change compiler to suite my needs, but worked with what I already have.

Please, if you find a link to constuctive Luke's criticism, please post it, I am willing to change my mind.

> And language is simple, my wife started writing it

...not sure what you're implying about your wife there.

Lack of context ^^

She is accountant turned web designer. After 0 programing experience she learned a bit of JS for about 3 months, started learning Elm - now she works with it day to day for a living (with different clients).

My point is, language is simple enough to grasp it really quickly and start using it productively.