0.18 works, but compilation takes too long - and apparently that was fixed in 0.19.
We've waited for this fix a long time (over a year), but we can't upgrade because the only (AFAIK) library that connects to Elixir's Phoenix Channels stopped working. In fact the language (0.19) currently has no websocket support.
During this whole year of development, we could not compile the 0.19-dev. It was somewhere closed. We couldn't even see the commits. Pretty sure there's a nice and long post somewhere explaining how "outsiders" would slow down the progress by giving, how dare them, feedback.
We could wait a little bit more, but, even though I was deeply in love with elm, the language that made me not dread frontend development anymore, I am now totally uninterested at it, driven away by 1) lack of transparency and 2) total blocking of genuine and constructive user feedback, which feels like censorship - or simply a closed-source, proprietary software.
The language is good though. Has some minor flaws, but I believe over time they will get fixed. Though it lacks some powerful features that will never be implemented. But ovoverall, we were able to tackle complexity quite nicely. I guess we - me and my team - just got tired of how it is handled.
Oh, and Elm is way too verbose. Pretty sure that 45kloc codebase will be about 15-20kloc in cljs!
I'm sorry to hear that you are unhappy with Elm, but I hear great things about CLJS and wish you the best with it.
I have one comment and one question, if you have time to respond.
> During this whole year of development, we could not compile the 0.19-dev. It was somewhere closed.
It was on GitHub under elm/compiler on the "dev" branch, which is the branch name Evan uses for in-progress work. Many people compiled and tried it out during this time, and some left comments directly on GitHub.
This was not a secret, but I can understand that maybe it felt like one since it was not on the "master" branch.
> total blocking of genuine and constructive user feedback, which feels like censorship - or simply a closed-source, proprietary software.
I understand that you've moved on, but it would help us out if you could link to an example of genuine and constructive user feedback being blocked like this, so we can learn from it.
We've tried to lock topics that have a well-known history of devolving into unconstructive flame wars, but I'm always open to the idea that we might have missed the mark.
This is a great response. I've only recently started learning Elm (and webdev in general... coming from a systems programming background). I chose ElmConf for the preconf to strange loop this year. Why not learn a new language.
I've seen quite a few people with fairly negative things to say about the community. I had my very first thread locked on elm just a couple of days ago. Apparently there were some deleted comments that were not so nice. Unfortunately, by the time I saw my posting locked, that meant it was too late for me to engage in any sort of conversation to figure out exactly what went wrong.
Let me be clear; the core of a community are the ones responsible for creating and maintaining the culture of the community, and of course protecting the community members from abuse. I understand this... But I don't understand how stopping conversations that "have a well-known history of devolving into unconstructive flame wars". It seems that is punishing people before they've actually done anything that violates that rules of the community. At least, that's certainly how I feel.
Regardless, I'm looking forward to my journey of learning Elm and using it to build some UI's my teams are going to be needing.
As I said, I'm attending ElmConf. I look forward to meeting you and others in the Elm community.
> It seems that is punishing people before they've actually done anything that violates that rules of the community. At least, that's certainly how I feel.
That's really good feedback, thank you! I have passed this along to the moderator team.
> As I said, I'm attending ElmConf. I look forward to meeting you and others in the Elm community.
Likewise - looking forward to meeting you!
I'll be there a few days before the conference, so if you'd like to meet up ahead of time, send me a DM!
It was locked and deleted from the front page within hours. There are many many more such posts that have been deleted. The only posts allowed on /r/elm are those praising Elm.
They always invite the users to discuss this in the Elm Discourse which is not constructive because threads about the "forbidden" topics (Native Code) are either locked or completely deleted within hours.
Thanks, I'll let everyone decide for themselves whether the deleted posts were personal attacks or not. Personally I don't see anything wrong with at least half of them.
Why do the moderators invite everyone to discuss on Discourse when you know you'll delete or lock a thread as soon as it's posted?
> Thanks, I'll let everyone decide for themselves whether the deleted posts were personal attacks or not. Personally I don't see anything wrong with at least half of them.
Okay, but "personally I would have only deleted half of those posts" is a much different claim than "The only posts allowed on /r/elm are those praising Elm," which is what you said above.
You really shouldn't make such serious claims if you don't mean them.
> Why do the moderators invite everyone to discuss on Discourse when you know you'll delete or lock a thread as soon as it's posted?
I understand that you're trolling me, but just for the record - of course we don't do that.
Ok, it's not literally "only" but most. /r/rust is a great example of healthy community. They only delete obvious troll/personal attack comments. You can go there right now and post a post similar to what you deleted on /r/elm and I bet it won't be deleted or locked.
> I understand that you're trolling me, but just for the record - of course we don't do that.
> Finally, a moderation note: I’m going to lock this thread since discussions on this topic have the unfortunate tendency to spiral out of control and we have already debated this past the point of productive return. If you have things you need to upgrade, we’re of course happy to help… let’s just do them in separate threads. :slight_smile:
Please don't suggest users of locked Reddit threads that they're welcome on Discourse. Just say the truth - you don't want any discussions about this anymore. There's no harm in being honest.
To me, those two mod notes are consistent and sincere. Both are saying "this particular topic has been debated to the point where discussions no longer make progress, they just take up people's time and energy. That said, by all means please feel free to start a new thread about something more specific if you'd like to discuss that."
I see this as analogous to React and JSX. When React came out, many people said "putting HTML in JavaScript is Wrong, and React shouldn't do this."
At first, whether React should use JSX was a reasonable thing to debate. In 2018, this has long since been settled. A 2018 thread arguing that React should abandon JSX is going to take up people's time but it's not going to change the outcome of a decision that was settled years ago.
This is how it is with things like Native and typeclasses in Elm. Maybe you disagree, but I think there comes a point where it's reasonable to say "it is not a good use of everyone's time to re-litigate an issue that has been settled for years. You may still disagree with the final decision, but that ship has long since sailed."
I can understand the argument that "people must be free to waste everyone's time, because anything else is tyranny" and I can also understand the argument that "the Internet is full of places to post whatever you please, but this forum is focused on collaboration, sharing, and learning, not wasting time." It seems reasonable to me for a given forum to embrace either one of those moderation philosophies.
This is why I see the two mod notes as consistent and sincere. They are both saying "these broader design decisions have long since been settled, and we're locking the topic because they are a magnet for contentious discussions that don't go anywhere. That said, you are genuinely welcome to start a fresh thread about a more specific topic to your particular situation."
Again, maybe you disagree with this moderation philosophy, but it's simply not true that mods are inviting people to post only to lock whatever the follow up would be. That would be ridiculous.
> If you'd like to discuss Elm's trade-offs, both pro and con, there are plenty of people who are willing to talk openly about them in a calm way. I'd recommend opening a thread on Elm Discourse if you're interested in that.
Please edit it to say that discussions about cons like native code will not be tolerated and will be locked or deleted without warning.
One more thing, why did you lock and delete the whole thread instead of just deleting the comments you found offensive? Was the dev.to post also something that shouldn't be discussed in Elm communities?
It's debatable whether some of the deleted posts were or weren't over the line, but it can't possibly be true that Elm mods are deleting all content that is critical of Elm.
Critical content is all over that thread, plain as daylight.
I don't think that's an entirely fair argument (although I agree that at some of these comments are easily justified for removal). Yes, there's still critical comments... In a thread that was completely hidden from the subreddit.
So the worst comments were deleted, and everything else, including the link to the blog post, hidden, and the existing participants stopped from continuing their discussion. Technically not being deleted is a small step.
Total ousider here. The reason given for locking it are just points of disagreement with the article. The reason doesn't point to anything within the article that is against the subreddits rules.
There are tons of bugs in 0.18 compiler and 0.18 libraries that will never be fixed. Many of those have / had pull requests by the community members open for more than a year but they were never merged. These are tiny fixes, not 200 lines of code adding a new feature. There's no way to fork a package and apply a patch in 0.19 if the package contains native code. All you can do is report the bug and hope Evan fixes it before your deadline (which ranges from 1 week to 3 years).
Edit: Using a throwaway so I don't get banned from Elm Discourse and /r/elm. I still have production applications using Elm.
> There's no way to fork a package and apply a patch in 0.19 if the package contains native code.
Yeah, if for no other reason than this I would never use Elm for a production site. The entire reason for using open source for me is being in control of the code, and not having to depend on a third party for a fix if things get bad enough.
I imagine because 0.19 has several backwards-incompatible changes and will probably not see updates or community interest/support.
I can't blame them - I worked on an SPA where the company used an older version of a javascript framework. After that version's docs went offline completely (they were actually for a slightly newer version with some extra functionality we couldn't use), the only existing docs were a PDF and the source code. Not a great position to be in.
The community is interested but PRs for 0.18 stopped being merged months before 0.19 alpha was released. I know I'm interested in a couple of patches, I'm also willing to write the code, but I won't because there's no chance they'll be merged and released. I'm using a private fork of those packages in my app for over a year now.
