[whichdan]

There's a lot to love about Elm, and I've written quite a bit of production code with it starting around 0.18.0. But in 2026 I'm not sure why a company would newly choose a language that hasn't otherwise been updated in nearly 7 years.

[auslegung]

Stability. It works. Frequent breaking changes to core functionality of your tech stack is not a feature, it’s a bug.

[Munksgaard]

Does it though? They are many longstanding bugs reported in their compiler repository, and this release doesn't seem to address any of them.

[auslegung]

Longstanding issues that prevent usage? Not for me and the projects I’ve been apart of. No doubt there are plenty of reported issues, and no doubt they truly negatively impact some users, but I would still much rather choose the usability and stability of Elm 0.19.1-2 than anything in the typescript ecosystem today

[sheept]

When I worked on an Elm app in 2020, my users reported compatibility issues with various browser extensions (e.g. Grammarly, 1Password). I personally would prioritize making my apps usable for my users over making the DX usable for myself, so I stopped using Elm for future projects.

[1-more]

Oh yeah those are a bear: grammarly, 1password, and darkreader were the big ones, but translation was too. Elm assumes it's the only thing modifying the DOM underneath its root element; the extensions assume the DOM is free to be manipulated. NRI did a writeup on how they fixed it. https://blog.noredink.com/post/800011916366020608/adopting-e... The TLDR is to use https://github.com/lydell/elm-safe-virtual-dom/

[int_19h]

You don't have to choose between Elm and TypeScript though, there are so many other options now - Haskell, F#, Rust, OCaml, just to name a few.

[nh23423fefe]

Weird not to mention Elm's massive breaking change that killed the project?

[auslegung]

How does that bear on my comment?

[wk_end]

Well, you're suggesting a reason to choose Elm is stability - a lack of breaking changes. But Elm is actually notorious for its wildly unpopular, dramatic, community-fracturing breaking changes. Backwards compatibility is not a concern for them.

It's a little tricky though, because the comment you were replying to was talking about the lack of updates. And in that sense, Elm is now very stable - no breaking changes (or any changes at all!) in seven years and counting.

(Although, for all the complaints about the React ecosystem: you can still write class-style React components, even though they were effectively deprecated when hooks were introduced just over seven years ago.)

OTOH, we have this blog post suggesting development on Elm is kicking up again. Which means more breaking changes might be incoming.

[dminik]

Dont worry, if breaking changes start happening, people will magically have always been saying it's good, actually.

[whichdan]

I agree that the stability is quite nice. But there are plenty of areas where the language could use some improvement - for instance, the ergonomics around writing nested Single Page Apps is pretty cumbersome.

[satvikpendem]

Bugs not being fixed is not a feature, it's a bug, and it's certainly not stability, it's just cope.