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by rapind 443 days ago
I hear ya, but Elm allowed me to eject out of the javascript churn for the past 7 years while still building some slick UIs that basically never fall over. I literally don’t know or care what the current hotness is in javascript, and that’s how I like it.

If roc ends up being even close to that productive for me, I really don’t care how widespread it is. I like these thoughtful unrushed languages that I can support for years without stress.

1 comments

> but Elm allowed me to eject out of the javascript churn for the past 7 years while still building some slick UIs that basically never fall over.

Thats the real tragedy. Elm was a good language but the culture around it means it could never achieve critical adoption. It is great technology for building frontends but how easily will I be able to maintain that app as the web changes over the years?

I can only speak from experience, but it's been absolutely solid, incredibly easy to maintain (because there's been so little change), and I don't feel like I missed out on any groundbreaking front end tech at all. I literally have some elm code that's been in production doing it's thing for 7+ years without any maintenance, but more importantly it's not scary to open it up and make changes 7 years later either.

I doubt it's a silver bullet for everyone, but it's been phenomenal for me as a solo dev w/ my own product. I feel so much better about my elm code than I do about my React code. I have to do all the other things, like marketing, sales, training, support, back end, etc. It's nice to launch a UI and know it'll last (and also that it's easy to refactor and augment too!). Elm has turned my into a statically typed functional fanboy. It's been a gateway drug to Haskell, OCaml, and F#.

I see the same promise with Roc, although I bet Richard will update it more frequently than Evan w/ elm after 1.0.

which culture and why it cased problems ? honest question, I barely heard of elm