Comment by satvikpendem
1 year ago
I remember reading this article when it was published, it seems like everything said continues to be true about Elm, so much that I don't hear about anyone using Elm these days, as even those who have used it as legacy code have now largely had enough time to migrate away.
I don't really follow Elm, but I was curious and tried to see whether the project is still alive. It appears the last commits on GitHub are from mid 2024 and the last installable release was 2019. It appears the main developer is working on a new thing?
There's definitely a "the bear is sticky with honey" confusion of discussion over whether it's dead or not. It would be nice for interested strangers like me if they could make some sort of clear statement on it.
> It appears the last commits on GitHub are from mid 2024
That's not what I see.
The last commits for elm/compiler were minor fixes in 2023. Last substantial changes were in 2021. See https://github.com/elm/compiler/commits/master/
The last commits for elm/core were in the first months of 2021. See https://github.com/elm/core/commits/master/
> It appears the main developer is working on a new thing?
One of the problems is that the developer said several times, even in a recent interview, that he was still working on elm, with a focus on the long term. He gave a few vague hints about his private roadmap. After 4 years without any real public activity, I find it hard to believe there's some private activity.
It's dead, maybe it just doesn't know it yet.
No, its not. They are focused on introducing ELM on the backend as well. ELM isn't backed by big corpos like Rust and Go do so their way of operation will differ by a huge margin than those two langs, especially in terms of marketing so its inaccurate to judge that its dead just due to the inactivity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SUM4869ODc
8 replies →
One of the core team members mentioned in the article showed up on HN a couple weeks ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42935516
Assuming that you're talking about Richard Feldman, he shows up regularly but not to talk about Elm—Roc is his new project, which is inspired by Elm but not trying to target the same niche.
I kind of wish the effort spent on Roc was put into productionizing/commercializing Koka (which Roc draws a lot of inspiration from) rather than starting an entirely new language. Like I get starting from scratch when it comes to Haskell, since there’s so much baggage there, but Koka is a pretty blank slate.
3 replies →
Can you link to the comment specifically? This is just a link to the submission itself.
The person in question (Richard Feldman) is the creator of Roc, which the linked article is about.
He also shows up in the comments here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42954103
Presumably https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42954103, which does not really concern Elm.
4 replies →
The “his comment” link here for this article: https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/#forka... In the HN submission I linked, the author of the article is the same.
1 reply →