[discardable_dan]

I think you are taking the wrong lesson. The lesson is not "things make break." Many languages break things. Haskell has made it a feature, not a bug.

But this change did more than break things. It meant people using Elm in production had to abandon it, nearly immediately, as all future work would first require them to port the whole stack, in one fell swoop, to Elm (and this was before tail recursion modulo cons was implemented, but recursion was forced).

Imagine if, in Rust's infancy, it decided to remove the C FFI with the argument that people should instead, naturally, rewrite that code in Rust. What would have happened? People would have abandoned it in droves, and it would have been essentially relegated to a research language, never again suited for prime time.

And -- oh, look what happened to Elm!