10 ms·
Arrogant is the most accurate word to describe Elm and its leadership. I tried to use Elm in production between 0.14 and 0.18 versions and it was fun and mind e
by scarfacedeb 6y ago
Arrogant is the most accurate word to describe Elm and its leadership. I tried to use Elm in production between 0.14 and 0.18 versions and it was fun and mind expanding experience. I'm truly grateful that I've used it because it introduced a lot of functional stuff to me. But I no longer use it myself or recommend it for any serious work.
Breaking changes were negligible in the beginning. But I got fed up with rewriting the app after the 3rd Elm upgrade. I think it's irresponsible to advertise the language to be used in production and break it every fucking year. Speeches about finding the perfect solution are great for academical discussions and toy languages, but you can't just remove the stuff that your community uses without offering any alternative. It all stems from the arrogance and cult-like behavior of the core team. I'm sure that they're wonderful and very smart people who do their best to create the best version of the language that they can. But their management style is too dictatorial and they don't respect their community.
For me, the split started with elm formatter discussion on github. I disagreed with some of decisions that the core devs made and I wanted to see what other developers have been saying about it. On of the issues was the preference for 4-space indentations instead of 2-space. I understand that it's important to have a single source of formatting for the language. But at that time there was no consensus on what amount of spaces to use. Basically, the community divided almost 50/50 between the two. Moreover, a lot of core libraries and example code still used 2-space indentation. (that's why I preferred it). Due to lack of consensus, there was a suggestion to add a flag to formatter to set the indentation. It required to change some parts of code to pass the flag to the formatting module. At that moment, one of the core devs stepped up and closed the discussion because he didn't approve of this decision and he just said that 2-space people should adapt to the new 4-space default (that wasn't supported by any majority). It was the first time when I felt that the Elm management is too strict and I don't want to have anything to do with people with such attitude.
- marcus_holmes 6y agoisn't this the exact problem that tabs solve?
- billman 6y agoYou might as well ask if he likes vim or emacs :)
- scarfacedeb 6y agoVim all the way >:)
- stronglikedan 6y agonano or nothin'!
- 1337shadow 6y agoYou can't compare vim and emacs, because emacs is more like nano.
- scarfacedeb 6y agowell, yeah. That'll be one way to solve it.
- dkersten 6y agoYep! If people used tabs, then everyone can display it how they like and these stupid discussions wouldn’t be necessary. Alas, for some reason the world has rallied behind spaces. Sigh.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- trevor-e 6y agoI can't tell if this is satire or not. Just because a language is open source does not mean it's a perfect democracy.
- cthor 6y agoTab width arguments are amusing, because it's always between 2 and 4. There’s actually a number between 2 and 4. For some reason it's never considered. I've got a summary of all the indentation arguments here: https://cthor.me/Indentation https://cthor.me/Indentation
- davidcuddeback 6y agoI had a CS professor in college who required assignments to be submitted with 3-space indentation.
- tobyhede 6y agoI would have shut that down too. I feel for the maintainers in this case. The stakes are so low.