[satvikpendem]

I don't know, after having used Elm and seeing the community accused of "hostile attacks" by one of the main contributors (who is the creator of Roc now) [0], I don't feel that it's worth my time to put into learning it, even if it is objectively good; I simply cannot know what the creators will do (or refuse to do, in the case of Elm) in the future, especially in a BDFL governance paradigm. This was in fact why I stopped using Elm after a while, it didn't seem like they wanted to ever address the issues they had, or even to acknowledge them as issues in the first place.

I know in my linked [0] that Feldman has since apologized, if only because the comment was being linked to so often [1], but again, why not use any other language where the creators are not so hostile, some even going so far as to say that they "wouldn't trust anything that Richard Feldman was involved in. He was instrumental in making the Elm community a hostile and unwelcoming place."?

[0] https://github.com/gdotdesign/elm-github-install/issues/62#i... (check the edit history)

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

[rtfeldman]

Wow, this is depressing to read. :(

5 years ago I was upset and posted a comment that was unfairly harsh to another commenter. I apologized at the time, and I meant it. I definitely should not have made the harsh comment that I did. It was wrong. There's no excuse for my having written it.

There are a lot of people working on Roc other than me. I'm not even the top committer anymore. [0] I hope you can find it in your heart to give their work some consideration, if not mine.

[0] https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/graphs/contributors

[wibblewobble125]

As a small datapoint, I brought up Roc at work last year and a colleague said “it looked interesting but it’s the guy from Elm isn’t it?” and brought up this.

As a manager, I empathize with the frustration you were feeling. Steering a team or a community towards a vision is very hard. Just when you think you’re getting somewhere, someone does the exact opposite and mixes people up. It’s easy to lose patience. I’ve made similar mistakes on popular projects and was fortunate enough that no one publicized them. I was allowed to learn from my mistakes without being punished for it.

I don’t have any advice on this. It’ll probably turn out fine.

[Capricorn2481]

Thanks for this comment. Personally, I appreciate how human and humble your response is, and Roc looks great.

[darthrupert]

Come join the open source software community. Everything you say will be used against you in the public court, forever.

[lambda_garden]

I believe in second chances. From the GitHub link:

> EDIT 5 years later: You can see in the edit history of this comment what I originally wrote here; I was upset and said unkind things that I regret, and which nobody deserved to hear. I apologized at the time and I still feel I should apologize again, unequivocally. I was in the wrong here.

[replwoacause]

Yep, this is good enough for me, and I suspect for anyone who is not hellbent on holding a grudge.

[cooperadymas]

Seriously ppl, go use a language where the creator is a paradigm of humanity. Maybe Python is a good choice?

Seriously, tho, that's the comment that "made the Elm community a hostile and unwelcoming place" and is still being dredged up after 5 years? That comment can barely even be considered harsh, and is nowhere near hostile.

Is it really worth tearing down someone's life, monitoring the internet for any time their name appears, just so you can spread the continue to spread the hate toward him after so long? This is where you make your stand?

[petepete]

A paragon of humanity?

[GavinMcG]

(The first part appears to have been sarcasm.)

[catlover76]

I don't see what was so harsh? I checked the edit history, I saw the original comments and subsequent minor tweaks. His response was rather testy and stubborn (as is the case with the Elm team generally, it seems), but not as much of a dick comment as I have seen elsewhere in GitHub issues.

[satvikpendem]

There is some more context here: https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/#forka...

> Threatening a person with exclusion from a community for attempting to patch the source code is quite antithetical to the spirit of Open Source, as far as I can see.

[ricardobeat]

From this post it feels like they never even understood the original comment about going against the project’s goals. The drama created around this is much, much larger than the issue warranted. If Roc keeps this audience away, maybe that is good thing.

Note that they were never prevented from forking the project (how would you even do that), instead they chose to try and stronghand the project into accepting their view, which is also not healthy for OSS. Maybe their Elm fork would be mainstream by now if it really catered to developers’ needs.

[hombre_fatal]

There's a certain infini-grudge-holding, emotional, drama-stirring archetype of software developer that's best left out of the community, especially that of a new, fledgling one.

It's always the same story, too. Someone felt personally wronged by something actually quite minor like their their PR getting ignored/rejected with perhaps a tone too snappy for them, and now they have a personal vendetta until the end of time with no rock nor HN comment section left unturned from them lingering in the past.

Sometimes you need to leave the theater and let the rest of us enjoy the show.

Hopefully a mod sinks this entire thread so we can read interesting thoughts about Roc.

[weatherlight]

There's no evidence thus far in the Roc community thats it's anything like ELM's community.

Seems like the Author of Roc is cool now, that was 5 years ago and hasn't done the thing you fear he might do? people get testy, say things they regret.

I understand trust is earned, but it's been 5 years. and the Roc community thus far have been really nice, welcoming and collaborative. I get Elixir and Ruby community vibes from these contributors.

Pick your battles I guess?

[satvikpendem]

Sure, but there are also a lot of languages to learn, in a vacuum I might learn Roc but now there are other options that don't have such history, it is not near the top of the list.

[weatherlight]

> other options that don't have such history

Roc isn't Elm. RF is one person in that community, and he said something he regretted 5 years ago and has since not repeated that mistake.

Do you know the moral dealings of every developer of every piece of technology you use?

When it comes to Roc and It's community..ask yourself.

    “Am I sure that what I am going to say is true?” 
    “Is what I'm going to say a good thing?”, 
    and “Do I really need to say it and is it useful?”

Is that comment from 5 years ago really the most important thing about the Roc Programming language, that anyone reading the comments need to know? Is RF the reason you walked away from Elm?

[satvikpendem]

It's not about moral dealings, it's about whether I can trust the creators to not mess up a second time if they had already messed up once. We were shipping Elm in production and we moved away because any issues that were brought up that we wanted to see solved were swept away. Eventually it wasn't worth keeping the Elm codebase around. So, why should I trust one of the same people again? We already learned an expensive lesson one time around.

> When it comes to Roc and It's community..ask yourself.

Sorry, but this kind of faux niceness is precisely what stopped people from asking about issues, as it was always argued that asking about such issues was not "useful," after some time. So yes, I do feel the need to bring up this topic if only for others to evaluate the creators themselves rather than only have "good" things to say that "really need" to be said.

[catlover76]

I appreciate the context because it sheds further light on a big problem with Elm the project, but that context doesn't change what he said, which simply wasn't that harsh or mean. Like, from your original comment, I expected some kind of personal attack on the other person lol

[jgilias]

I believe people should be given second chances. There’s a good chance that the Elm debacle has taught most people involved a thing or two.

[jchw]

No doubt everything could've been learned and heeded by now, I think it's really, really, really hard to say "OK, so then everyone should go and try to raise $4000/mo for the new project they have." Even just using a programming language is an investment of time and trust, too, lest you want to wind up stranded on some-old-version-of-Elm island with tens of thousands of lines of code.

Elm also seemed very promising in the beginning, and honestly I don't even think that comment is so abhorrent on its own. I think Elm died the death of a thousand cuts. If it had only been one errant comment somewhere, it would've been mostly forgotten about by now. Instead, it's Elm that's mostly forgotten about.

So I say best of luck, but also... No thanks for now.

edit: Just so it's completely clear, I am actually implying that "maintainers being dicks" was actually not the problem with Elm. I think people just got especially infuriated by it because they were sick of trying to deal with Elm's breaking changes, of which this represented one. I remember going through and learning Elm and like literally months later everything was completely different and I no longer knew how to make a basic hello world application (around 0.16 or 0.17 maybe? Can't recall. I just remember that effects had changed a fair bit.) I know that to some degree this is the nature of a 0.x product, but at some point it's like "OK... then who is supposed to even use this?" Among other issues of course.

[satvikpendem]

This is how I feel too. Sure, it was 5 years ago and things might have changed, but there are a ton of other technologies and languages to learn, so why not learn something without all of that previous drama? These things indeed might take a significant time inventment so I'll just focus on something I know might be more interesting or durable.

[johnisgood]

I would not even have known about this drama without the person who reminded us of it. That said, I still do not care about it at all.

Imagine me not using Linux because of Linus being harsh (yet educative) to some people... or not using OpenBSD because of Theo... or not using Common Lisp because of #lisp... :P I have received some hostile feedback personally, but they were in the right. I did not take it to heart but I learned from it.

That said, I have checked the edit history and I cannot see what the fuss is about. Welp. Moving on.

[jchw]

It's very easy to say this having not invested anything into Elm and not been there. I'm just thankful that most of what I invested in Elm was only time, and we never actually wound up deploying Elm to the frontend.

Forget about all of the drama, imagine if you used Linux and it stopped updating at 2.6. Elm has been at 0.19 since 2018, and that's not because there's nothing left to improve on.

[johnisgood]

> imagine if you used Linux and it stopped updating at 2.6. Elm has been at 0.19 since 2018, and that's not because there's nothing left to improve on.

Yup, that definitely would be an issue.

[Capricorn2481]

Wait till you find out about Linux

[epgui]

Maybe I'm not understanding something, but I would use a programming language I liked even if one of the main contributors was the worst human on earth.

I don't understand why people have to make technical stuff personal.

[desireco42]

I think we need to be able to accept apologies when someone makes them... otherwise we are all doomed.

[ollysb]

Everyone has their moments no? In person Richard seemed like a super nice guy and the many lectures he did for Elm really showed a passion for helping improve the day to day experience for developers. He was also super active on the forums and slack helping people out.

[ctenb]

There is an argument that people who made mistakes and genuinely learned from them and apologized could be more trustworthy than people who had not made that mistake to begin with.