> This is FUD. For any normal web app you don't need that functionality, just use the built in "ports" concept to interface with JS stuff.

The change was handled extremely poorly. I only knew one team using Elm in production at the time. They went from being huge proponents of Elm to recommending against it after the 0.18/0.19 changes and drama upended a lot of their work.

If it's really just a "hardcoded whitelist" that causes trouble, said fork would truly be easy to maintain.

Until they do some other halfbaked thing that's harder to follow along with. When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.

Compilers are supposed to be boring, especially when your language has ~exactly 1. If you can't trust the people maintaining it, it's too much risk to take. Having to do an entire rewrite in a different language can easily kill a company or a project.

Would you need to maintain a fork at all? Couldn't you obliterate the rule when building the compiler?

What's the difference between that and a fork?

One doesn't require a "community of maintainers", its an adhoc tool you use to get your own stuff done, every project has them what is one more?

Until another change against the community interest comes along. You only trust the "benevolent dictator" for as long as they remain benevolent.

It would be, if the code wasn't so horrifically bitrotted at this point. GHC has changed a lot since Elm last got any meaningful update, and they decided to use unsafe GHC primitives everywhere that have no support guarantee. You have to fix a bunch of issues with the compiler source before it will even compile on a relatively new version of GHC.

It would be weird to create such a fork casually, but it's a bit surprising that nobody in the community did it by now. Isn't forking the open source way of dealing with political disputes like this?

Gren is apparently such a fork: https://gren-lang.org/

Is it? https://gren-lang.org/book/faq.html#what-are-the-differences... doesn't mention anything about native code.

> While we could spend considerable time and effort in creating a language which would look very similar to Elm, we've instead decided to fork the compiler and core packages, and use that as the basis of Gren.

https://gren-lang.org/news/220530_first_release/

One of Evan’s colleagues from NoRedInk actually started his own language heavily inspired by Elm that aims to fix a lot of its ecosystem problems.

https://www.derw-lang.com

I’m not sure if it’ll go anywhere but I like the idea that it’s interoperable with existing JS/TS packages.

I was using Elm full-time back then, and I think some important context to note is that 0.18 had outstanding issues which had seen no movement for years (and PRs were generally ignored). The official guidance was “wait for 0.19.” While 0.19 addressed many or all of these issues, it came with a number of breaking changes, some very significant. It also coincided with a reorganization of the GitHub repos which happened to scrub all past issues, PRs, and discussion as well as a more stringent moderation policy on the official forums.

Well that last bit alone would put me permanently off a language. It's always wild to me when open-source leaders let the power go to their heads. If they want that kind of control over a community, they should go start a backwoods cult. Or at least start a company where they're signing the paychecks.

That's why I left Elm. There were major unfixed bugs for years. I liked the concept, but I couldn't deal with the slow progress to fix things.

> It was bad enough that they got it wrong, but then Evan doubled down by dedicating the opening of his next conference talk to mocking the users who were unhappy about the changes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGlzRt-FYto

> The part where he mocks a commenter for asking "Is Evan killing Elm's momentum?" is weirdly prescient, given that these events ultimately did mark the slowdown of the Elm community. Elm development came to a near halt about a year later.

Wow, that was hard to watch. He takes people being passionate about Elm and discussing potential issues and mocks them.

If I was a proponent of Elm that felt uneasy about its direction at the time, this would have made it easy to walk away from.

Forking a compiler is a gigantic pain. None but the most hardcore would bother. It's far easier to give up pushing the boulder and go use something else, which I hazard to say many have done. Or, they see the difficulty in using ports for stuff and never even start using the language.

not sure if FUD or not, but i distinctly remember people saying that they feared to fork the compiler because they were threatened with being banned from all the official channels and fora if they did.

How hard could it be to spin an anonymous fork though.

if you're going through all the trouble of forking you want to build a community around your fork, so you're not the only one maintaining it.

C'mon, it's forking a whitelist.

no, i was around in the elm community at the time, and what people wanted to fork for was a better way to support native js code in their own projects. there was a bit more to it than just adding filenames to a whitelist.

Once the maintainer has ignored all community feedback on said whitelist and then threatened said members of community for considering removing the whitelist, why in the world would you assume it'll remain "just a whitelist"?

Ports are not really a solution for rendering code. Obvious example is internationalization API. It’s not feasible to communicate back and forth through port every time you want to format a date.

Some folks propose web components but that’s another can of worms. Increase in complexity and still no help from compiler.

> It’s not feasible to communicate back and forth through port every time you want to format a date.

Why not? Is it code complexity or runtime inefficiency you are referring to?

Actually both.

Let's say that on desired page, you have three components with dates somewhere - date of article, dates of comments below and date of last login in the header.

After some user action, you navigate to this page. In Elm terms that mean your Model updates and then your rendering functions will run.

Only then you can see that you need to format dates - your rendering function should be responsible for formatting.

Rendering function should be synchronous - so you need to return some string for date - "loading state" or default format. So user gets "flash of unformatted date".

Now, you should somehow communicate with Port - that mean, send asynchronous message "format this date for me". (And sending messages in render function is not something really supported out of the box in Elm)

Then Port comes back with response, you need to put this formatted value in your global Model (some kind of Dict from unformatted to formatted dates?) and that triggers another render with formatted value.

In summary: - you have multiple render loops where one would be enough - you pollute your global Model with junk that could be easily derived - you introduce latency in rendering because Ports are asynchronous

Ports are great for interaction - user clicks something, you can send command and wait for response and update your model. But there are a lot of cases where you want use synchronous, pure function from Javascript like Intl API.

So, the elegant way to solve this would be to use an Elm i18n library and just use ports to get the users region instead of formatting every single string.

I understand that it is hard for a software developer to accept that these things need to be reimplemented, but it also seems to be a natural consequence of "up-typing" an entire eco system.

I studied formal techniques for PL. A large portion of the work was in reimplementing existing things in Coq, HOL, etc. Not particularly interesting, but necessary to reach a mature ecosystem.

I do undestand that this makes it a no-go for a lot of people until these things have been implemented. This is also natural.

> but it also seems to be a natural consequence of "up-typing" an entire eco system.

Reimplementation of i18n API in Elm would make sense only if benefits from types could outweigh robustness of browser implementation. Due to not very expressive Elm type system I really doubt that. You can’t capture intricacies of i18n in Elm type system.

I have more confidence in already tested and used by millions API in the browser than in reimplementation in niche language.

Elegant solution would be if I could write well typed layer that calls browser API. Low bar of entry would drive adoption and in effect real world test. But that’s not possible anymore.

> Elegant solution would be if I could write well typed layer that calls browser API

Not if your goal is correctness.

Again, it is completely OK that Elm is not your choice if it does not align with your values, which appears to be the case.

> Not if your goal is correctness.

Could you define correctness in this context? I'm asking because I don't believe that you can achieve correctness using Elm type system. I don't see how you can encapsulate i18n rules inside Elm type definitions. Maybe something like Coq could do this ...

You can't express something like "if passed 3 as group size, integer part of the number should be represented as string with separators between three digits". Even in Elm that's something that you need to handle not in type system but in runtime code.

What is more - many core packages are just this - typed layer over browser API. elm/regex introduce barely any type safety. It assumes that browser API is "correct".

> Again, it is completely OK that Elm is not your choice if it does not align with your values, which appears to be the case.

I often see this response from Elmers but really I don't understand the point of it. I responded to claim that Ports solve all problems. I provided good, real example where Ports are a bad solution. In return I was scolded that I don't understand software engineering.

I don't jump into elmconf and complain or demand changes. I just provide my take on the discussed issue. And to be frank, I think that's very valuable take for someone who decides if Elm is good for them. That kind of information is not present on elm homepage and is not obvious for new users.

Well, as with all logic systems you can only express correctness up to its granularity. Elm's type system is, as you mention, very rudimentary and basically just HM + reactive programming.

First, I don't write any serious applications in Elm, and would never do it. I don't find that it is productive because of the reasons you list. Just as I would never write any serious applications in Coq.

But with Elm, as with Coq, I can appreciate that their goals are not immediate developer productivity. Maybe some day when the ecosystems needed are fully implemented. Until then I just applaud everybody working on systems that are strongly typed and ensure that all their dependencies are.

I believe this will provide tremendous value – when ripe.

The problem with I18n in particular is that reimplementing in Elm causes pretty unreasonable download size bloat.

> And it being open source means nothing stops you from forking it and adding your own native modules. Reason no one has done it is it's no need, and doing thinga that way would break the promises the compiler makes about no runtime bugs.

No, it's because one of the core team members made threats against everyone who said they were thinking of forking it: https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/#forka...

I've never seen such an openly hostile OSS maintainer team as Elm's.

sveasoft

Sveasoft wasn't OSS.

Sure they were, they just didn't want to admit all their code was GPL.

Wow, that is wild! And yes, that kind of thing can totally drive off contributors.

Long ago I went to a local Scala unconference. At the time there were at least two popular web frameworks, and one of the authors was in attendance. [1] Chatting during one of the breaks, I asked him some question about his framework, something about testability of apps. He quickly grew enraged and shouted at me. I slunk off, wondering what I had done wrong.

At the bar after the conference, a few different people apologized to me for his outburst. Not him, mind you, just other people. I was like, "Aha, I recognize this. He's a missing stair." [2] He was clearly an asshole to people on the regular, but the community just put up with it.

That was the last time I went to a Scala event. Life's too short to put up with bullies, or people who accommodate them.

[1] I no longer remember which framework or which author.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair

Presumably Lift / David Pollak, which haven't been relevant for about 10 years; the Scala community has gone through a lot of effort to remove bad actors since then, for the record (and while the drama lingers on, I don't think anyone would deny that standards are much higher now).

I'm glad to hear it, but for me that still leaves Scala one down on every other language. Once bitten, twice shy.

This is a poor line of reasoning - pretty much every community acquires an ass at some point and when it's not something they've dealt with previously it often takes them a while to figure out how to react.

The question is how they do react once they've figured it out, and Scala's come along in leaps and bounds in that regard.

If anything, you should be more wary of groups that haven't yet dealt with that problem, because they've had no chance to develop the relevant antibodies yet.

I mean, I get it, if you have a bad experience with X, it's going to colour your perceptions going forwards, being human be like that - but similarly to throwing away a dice because you rolled a nat 1 with it at an inopportune moment, it's far from the most rational response available to you.

A community isn't "a dice". It has state. Indeed, dice are precisely designed to be uncorrelated roll to roll. You're claiming it's still weighted, just in a different direction now.

Did they really clean things up? Or is it just talk about how things have changed? The way to find out for sure is for me to spend time in the community. It could be better, or the abuse could just be better hidden. And honestly, given the revolution in recent years in codes of conduct and DEI, I suspect my odds are better with newer communities, as there are now plenty of "antibodies" out there.

But all this tickled my memory. Wasn't their an FP advocate who was also an abusive jackass and far-right kook just a few years back? Yes, yes there was. And gosh, what community was he prominent in? Scala. So if I had waited 5 years and given Scala another chance, I would still have landed in a community where there was significant support for abusive behavior.

Maybe he was booted in 2019 or so? Hard to tell from the web. From his tweets, it look like he has crept back in. Is that because he and Scala are worlds better? or is it just the usual missing stair routine that I observed more than a decade ago? I don't know, can't tell, and won't be finding out, because there are plenty of other technologies for me to pick up.

> given the revolution in recent years in codes of conduct and DEI, I suspect my odds are better with newer communities, as there are now plenty of "antibodies" out there.

A lot of that stuff can easily just enable a different set of broken stairs though.

Crafting a code of conduct such that it makes it easy to deal with both reactionary -and- wokescold flavoured bullies is something of an art form, and I've seen a number of communities manage to completely fail at one of the two albeit usually in a very well-meaning way.

Antibodies are great up until they give you an auto-immune syndrome, basically.

(I definitely saw the far right kook get defenestrated, though the community may still be sufficiently quokka to've let him sneak back in through a different door, I'm mostly an observer here - and mostly only looking at all because as a veteran code of conduct advocate I tend to find the various failure modes worth examining)

Sure, and I never said otherwise. I'm just saying my personal heuristic is "once bitten twice shy". If you would like to apply a different one in your life, godspeed. But move along with your "poor line of reasoning" accusations. I've just demonstrated how it was not only a reasonable heuristic, it was also proven correct for the very community I was talking about.

An N=1 example of an instance where a line of reasoning produced an accurate answers proves that it -can- produce the right answer, but does not, in fact, tell you anything beyond that about how likely it is to produce the right answer in any given case.

So "I've just demonstrated how it was [...] a reasonable heuristic" is simply unsupported here. If it's working for you, great, maybe you're encountering a different subset of communities than I am, maybe you've been lucky, maybe I'm simply dead wrong, but getting Elm-maintainer-style passive aggressive over somebody pointing out logical flaws in the underlying claim as to why the heuristic is 'proven correct' is a rather unfortunate way to respond to what was written as constructive criticism of said logic.

I see. You'll only listen to me when I've been abused in a statistically significant number of communities. Definitely somebody I'm going to listen to on the topic of where the good communities are.

Not much has changed, no worries.

Hah, thanks! A nice counterpoint to the person who said otherwise. And especially to the person who seems to think that I must have some sort of brain damage to be concerned.

One way Scala experts deal with people disagreeing with them is to contact those peoples' employers/universities, maybe you should revise your profile accordingly.

Come on, this is FUD. You're talking about one or two guys who got into an enormous personal fight years back and were condemned by everyone else.

Who condemned Martin? Sources please.

Why do you even need to care about this as a user?

And mind you this is a front end tool.

They did a big change of stuff that people depend on, without consulting the community, and then doubled down, threatened people that wanted to fork, all with a weird passive-aggresive tome.

You don't need to care about this as a user. That's my point. People at HN complain about elm things that won't affect you.