[idoubtit]

> It's not like it would stop working out of the blue.

Unless the benevolent dictator pushes out a new Elm version that is not backward compatible.

And, if the process is the same it was a few years ago, it could happen next month and only a happy few know it. The development is done behind closed doors.

It happened to a project of mine, from version 0.17 to 0.18 IIRC. The choice was between letting the code slowly rot, rewriting a large part of it still in Elm but with the new paradigm, or switching to some stable JS framework. I had overall enjoyed working with Elm until that.

[SupremumLimit]

FWIW, no significant changes to the language are expected in the next couple of years.

Another side of this argument is that the rate of Elm ecosystem change is far more manageable than for JS.

A "stable JS framework" is an oxymoron, I'm afraid. My JS tools and NPM packages continuously change from under me, but somehow that's considered normal and not a problem.

I've just looked up a project I have with a mere 9 dependencies, and 7 of them have gone through multiple major version changes since the end of 2019. The other two have had minor releases. None are unchanged, even though all were already "stable" when I added them! Will the code still work if I update them? I don't know. Do I want to spend the time continuously tracking the changes to these dependencies, testing, making new releases of my project? Not really.

Perhaps I could continue deferring dependency updates, but that might make my job that much more painful when I have a legitimate reason to update (eg. for some new features I need) as half the package APIs will have changed beyond recognition by then.

I have so much less trouble with going back to Elm projects and picking up where I left off. That should be taken into consideration too.

[razze]

> Unless the benevolent dictator pushes out a new Elm version that is not backward compatible.

That wouldn't break your build/deploy out of the blue, as you don't get force updated to the latest version.

And having worked on the 0.19 transition, it was in public preview for about 3/4 of a year and regularly discussed in the elm slack. When 0.19.1 came about, there were some more pre-release versions, where evan asked people to test and give feedback in slack. Can't speak for versions before that.

[durbat]

Same here. Still on 0.18, no upgrade path as 70% of my deps never upgraded. Awaiting rewrite in vue/react/etc

[razze]

You can just vendor those dependencies, that's what I did, but I only had one that didn't update. And that one was trivial to fix.