Comment by tempest_
1 month ago
As a mostly back end dev Elm looked really nice but all the conflict with the creator and then the lack of compiler releases made me shy away a bit.
I have bumped into "the Elm architecture" in other projects though and it was nice.
Not many people use elm directly but it has influenced the design of so many frameworks and libraries.
Right now I’m toying with the idea of building a GNOME application in rust, and the framework I’m using is relm4 which provides elm like abstractions over gtk-rs.
Previously I’ve built web applications with F# and elmish, which again provides elm like abstractions for building F# applications.
The Roc programing language is being developed because Richard Feldman wanted an Elm like experience in more places then just the front end.
> all the conflict with the creator
Just so no one misunderstands this. The creator (Evan) didn't get into, or start, any drama himself that I ever noticed. I'd argue he's a very chill and nice dude.
I've been on the edges of the community for probably a decade now (lurker), and all of the drama came from other people who simply didn't like the BDFL and slow releases strategy.
Yeah I'm not a front end dev but I do kind of keep track of what's going on in that space. From what I saw it seemed Elm was all but dead. Maybe that's not true, but that was the impression from the outside looking in.
https://iselmdead.info/
I can't believe this is still up tbh. And I can't believe there's still people defending Elm's lack of development
> It’s true that there hasn’t been a new release of the Elm compiler for some time. That’s on purpose: it’s essentially feature-complete.
Last talk I saw by Evan Czaplicki (from the 2025 Scala Days conf) he seemed to be working on some sort of database language https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OtN4iiFBsQ
> And I can't believe there's still people defending Elm's lack of development
Why? (I'm one such person defending Elm's lack of development)
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I get the sentiment. He feels like everything he wants is there so it doesn't need much more development. But it still feels off.
> the lack of compiler releases
I'm a backend dev mostly and use Elm for all my frontend needs. Yes there are some things compiler-side that could be improved, but basically it's fine.
I appreciate not having to keep up with new releases!
Which conflicts? Gleam seems to be released often?
The elm drama