Ask HN: Is Elm Dead?

40 points by felixguendling 3 years ago | 19 comments

Elm looked very promising when it was new and made continuous progress for a while. But now the GitHub repositories don't show activity anymore. https://github.com/elm/compiler

Web technology is still moving fast and Elm just stopped. The version number indicates that it's still unstable (breaking changes expected).

The number of participants in 'State of Elm' also indicate declining interest: https://state-of-elm.lamdera.app/

Some ideas are really nice, so it would be a bummer if it dies.

Did I miss something?

pawelduda 3 years ago |

IIRC the main problem of Elm that it was one man show and the author was really restrictive about allowing anyone else contribute to the core. At least that's when I lost interest. Not sure what happened between then and now. It was one of these risky "niche squared" bets so maybe that's why it never took off.

bradwood 3 years ago | |

Sounds like this vim needs a neovim

ProfXponent 3 years ago | |

This is the main reason I never used it for more than toy apps.

Personally I think the programming model works pretty well

hnuser847 3 years ago |

It’s been dead for years, which is a shame because it was downright the most enjoyable front-end framework/language I had ever worked with. Sure, there’s nothing stopping you from picking it up and writing an app with it right now, but you’re doing so knowing that the language will likely never have future updates going forward.

stefanos82 3 years ago |

Seems pretty alive to me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vexdf-Rd-AE

metaketa 3 years ago |

See this "recent" status update: https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/status-update-3-nov-2021/78...

ImpressiveWebs 3 years ago |

I don’t know anything about using Elm in practice but I’ve been curating a newsletter[1] for front-end developers for almost 10 years now. I often share new scripts, plugins, and tools related to different JavaScript libraries. Over 450 issues later, I think I’ve only shared an Elm-related tool around 4 times. I don’t think Elm is dead, but it’s certainly not something I see come across the literally hundreds of sources I scour every month when curating the newsletter content.

[1] https://webtoolsweekly.com

joecot 3 years ago |

Fun story. I showed up at my current company, and some frontend dev had convinced everyone that everything should be written in Elm. Their phone client, the frontend website, everything. Then, their lead dev left and so did the frontend dev. Lucky for me, only one part of one page actually made it to production. But this was around 9 months of multiple developers' time just flushed down the toilet. None of it was usable, none of it was worth learning Elm to finish.

me_me_mu_mu 3 years ago | |

That’s awful. I would fire people like that on the spot if the goal is to ship and grow.

zem 3 years ago |

the main idea behind the language (TEA, for "the elm architecture") has caught on pretty well though, and can be found in a number of other frameworks.

girishso 3 years ago |

Stopped development does not mean it's dead. There are few Elm jobs posted on slack every month.

huqedato 3 years ago |

We'd been using it until 2015 more or less. Since then we pass to TS/React and later to Phoenix/Liveview. Elm simply couldn't satisfy our functional demands. Our IT lead considered to be... dated.

danbruder 3 years ago |

it is very much alive. it’s lack of churn is a feature not a bug.

funcDropShadow 3 years ago | |

But then it might be time do declare it stable.

brainbag 3 years ago |

mint-lang is inspired by Elm and has a much friendlier/open community. Not involved (though I've contributed) - just a fan.

mikewarot 3 years ago |

I'm convinced that "managed effects" in Elm are the wave of the future...

but I can't find any reasonable explanation of what they are

Yeah, I know... a weird place to be

hereforphone 3 years ago |

I thought this would be about the email client.

scumola 3 years ago | |

Me too. I was going to respond, "I moved to pine like 20 years ago!". LOL

darepublic 3 years ago |

Typescript became popular