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by akst 26 days ago
Wish them all the best, I really respected the efforts made to normify some of ideas with unapologetic mathematic names like monads and such

But then you see stuff like this https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/

The author is very charitable in their description of the Elm Core teams actions in these interactions, but you read it and they come off entirely unaccountable and dismissive. If they want to make a purely functional language locked down, you really should be upfront that they don't have time to make sure basic parts of the web ecosystem are arbitrarily locked off like i18n until they decide users of their langauge are permitted to use it after ruling out any suggestion it doesn't undermine the purity they were going for.

https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/bindings-for-intl/1264

Gonna be honest, really got the impression the maintainer here couldn't be stuffed looking to it, and wasn't personally impacted and largely didn't give a shit. Proceeds to run off some bullshit to dismiss the issue entirely about it being too risky (he had better things to do, and anyone he can delegate this too does too), the poster offers to do the work write a report, etc, etc. Then he's ghosted and for some reason the thread is shut after 10 days lol??? I guess giving him the dignity of a reply is out of the core teams hands because of how they arbitrarily configured their discourse.

Don't blame that dude for leaving Elm, glad I never made the mistake of wasting my time being dependent on its infantilizating runtime.

Look if you want to avoid being too coupled to the runtime your language exists in, sounds like a cool experiment, but maybe don't drag everyone along with you until you figure out the basic issues.

All that is 6 years ago hopefully they're more self aware.

2 comments

The automatic closing of threads is so hostile to the community.
I see all these people complaining about Elm limiting privileges to certain Github projects. A sensible complaint. But why hasn't anyone simply forked Elm, made the small tweak to make the check function return true or whatever, and offer that as a download/patch to the community?

I understand that defaults matter and that can have a large impact on the flow of libraries and code and stuff... my point is more, if you've got production code bases on this language, or at least, did 6 years ago, why so helpless? Nothing makes the point that an open source project can't dictate to its customers like the customers taking the "open source" part seriously.

I don't actually expect that to "work". What I expect to happen is that in the second-order effects that it would resolve this matter one way or the other once and for all. Either the core language realizes they need to accept the change, or the community works around the blocker, or the core language goes closed source and removes all doubt and people can move on, including their production services.