| I think some negative fanboyism is because Elm promises a lot, and also delivers a lot of promises but there are some choices that sort of rub against our intuitions about software. Principle of least surprise. Example 1: No typeclasses? Fine. But why is there comparable, which quacks like a typeclass and why can only kernel code use it? Practical implication: sorting, which is a bread and butter language/library feature is messy to code and inefficient at runtime. Example 2: Why isn’t negative number pattern matching just fixed based the principle of least surprise and as a clear bug rather than gaslighting those who found 10 seperate examples of why pattern matching (which is a sugared if/switch) should blow up at compile time with negative numbers. None of this makes sense. So I think it is good to warn people who are about to invest a lot of time. There will be edges where you wont have fun. Finally; whether the api gets broken next month or there will be zero releases this decade is not clear. It is not a language where you can reason about it’s future, like maybe you can with JS, Java, Python, C# etc. Elm is an experimental language. It is also production ready. That intersection is rare and I think that is what causes issues. Haskell spent a long time as a toy before people made it a production language. And now it is no longer experimental on the whole. No benedict is going to do a 180 on Haskell. You are just gonna get more GHC language extensions for experimenting with ideas. I think this is better/more mature approach. |