[pseudocomposer]

I’ve been using Elm professionally at a very profitable, lean company the last two years. (Didn’t know it coming in, but had enough React, Redux, and other experience to learn quickly.) The Elm community would call this a feature. How much React code you wrote 6-8 years ago will work perfectly and identically with today’s React toolchain?

It’s a whole different set of values. Good React code in 2026 looks like any compiling Elm code since 2016.

[dminik]

Any code you wrote on a React version from 6 years ago will still work the same on that React version today. Let's make that a fair comparison.

I get that some people like stability, but that is quite different from going without updates for 6+ years.

[pseudocomposer]

I don’t like being disagreeable, but just no. On both of these.

First, the comparison is perfectly fair. Elm 0.19.1, 6 years ago/0.19.2 today, React 16.1 6 years ago/19.2 today. Literally identical conditions. What is unfair? Which required app developers to do more work? Which saw more security issues among its releases?

Second, not needing updates for 6 years, and having zero security holes in that time, is the definition of stability. This isn’t really a matter of opinion or preference.

I do see the appeal in other frameworks (ecosystem size, easier to find devs), but the appeal of Elm truly is stability. And it really is that much better than nearly everything else that runs in the browser, in that regard.

No framework that allow you to use actual JS (or “transpiles” but gives you the full JS API, like Coffee/TypeScript), will ever offer the level of stability Elm offers (aside from maybe the web standard APIs on which Elm is narrowly built).

[troupo]

> How much React code you wrote 6-8 years ago will work perfectly and identically with today’s React toolchain

Almost all of it? Meanwhile Elm had extremely painful "Evan knows best" breaking changes that all but killed it and any momentum it once had

[square_usual]

> How much React code you wrote 6-8 years ago will work perfectly and identically with today’s React toolchain?

Today's Elm toolchain is the Elm toolchain of 6 years ago!

[OhSoHumble]

Oh yeah, no shade against the language itself. I had fun learning it and using it for some toy development years ago - and the TEA still exists in multiple library implementations. Just wild to see the creator of the language emerge from the fog like that.