Clients expressing doubt about choosing Elm

I did some analysis on Elm for a company early 2020 and ended up skeptical about applying this to a large Line of Business application.

Here is my first impression as I recall it:
The elm-lang.org website had no recent updates or blog posts, the Search Result on google was broken (still is), the reddit was dead or dying, the discourse had some activity but mostly locked threads, the package manager has a lot of packages with few or no updates. Relative to React there are few public apps demonstrating its potential. I read some of the impressive, and some of the dismissive blog posts. I quickly dismissed the enterprise potential, and the project ended up with React.

I was intrigued enough about the promise of no runtime exceptions to continue learning the language and following the community on my spare time. After getting to know the language, its design goals, it packages philosophy, and its community better I now have a different view. It’s not a clear-cut decision in Elms favor, but it would not be dismissed before technical experimentation.

I think Elm and this community has something great brewing, but elm does not have adoption as its focus. And this lack of driving adoption is a blocker for companies looking to adopt. They default to the same safe choices as their peers, and elm no longer has that much of an perceived edge to other languages that the risk of being non-conforming is worth it.

Finally, this is not a personal or organizational critique. This is how I perceived the project from the outside when going in with NO prior knowledge to Elm. I write this as a data point to how this can be improved, as I have since become interested in the language and its possibilities.

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