Elm is not popular, in fact it’s extremely ridiculed. But I don’t see the kinds of useful things I seen in Elm (and Lamdera) anywhere else.
I’ve used F# extensively and despite it’s backing from Microsoft and the claims that it is a “practical” language; Elm / Lamdera is far more practical in day to day use. With all that money they’ve accomplished creating a language that still produces runtime errors, gets more and more complex with every release, and ultimately represents negative ROI for learning it. Don’t get me wrong I would rather use F# than most alternatives, but it’s just the reality of the production economics vs Elm.
Elm on the other hand, with a handful of excited enthusiasts, is extremely simple to teach to intermediate programmers, makes zealots out of around a third of those who learn it, and represents a way to deliver user value extremely fast.
I also think Elm is going to make a comeback as LLMs and LLM based editors improve, because the main hurdle to jump over (compilation) is also the main hurdle to functionality (if it compiles it works*). In other languages there are far more hurdles.
Thank you all for keeping the dream afloat when so many others jumped ship!
However, I disagree with almost all the terms of this statement:
Elm is going to make a comeback as LLMs and LLM based editors improve, because the main hurdle to jump over (compilation) […].
First, “comeback” would imply that Elm was more popular in the past than it is now. That is not my impression and would require some sources to support it.
Admitting this lack of popularity, I don’t see how LLMs would help.
LLMs require a huge amount of training data to be relevant. If a language doesn’t have many samples, LLMs will be less efficient than they are for more popular languages. They don’t break vicious cycles; they maintain them: the lower the popularity, the worse the experience.
To me, compilation is not a hurdle but an asset. Compared to the undefined behavior of JavaScript, the Elm compiler is a relief.
The most challenging aspect of Elm for me has been (and still is) the typing system. However, each time I tried to use an LLM to assist me with that, it resulted in failure, often leading to strange hallucinations. I suspect LLMs struggle with types in the same way they struggle with math.
In any case, I share your enthusiasm for the community!
For curiosity I monitor data on updated and created repositories on Github for different programming languages. Elm’s stats have been steadily falling for 7 years now, peaking at more than 400 new repositories every month in late 2017 and falling to about 50 today.
Just an anecdote, but I remember r/elm being at least in the top 5% of all subreddits a few years ago. Now it has fallen instead of rising (7%) and the number of users rose from 10K to just 11K in a significant amount of time.
None of this counts as a definitive judgement on Elm’s popularity by any means, but it shows a trend.
I would also say Elm has been falling in popularity from a peak around 2017/18 when there was widespread excitement about its potential. Without any stats to back me up, I would say it is following a classic hype cycle:
I believe Elm is likely to now be on the Slope of Enlightenment. Which is great really, it means it didn’t die in the Trough of Disillusionment like many things do. So Elm may indeed be making a comeback.
I love Elm so much. I wish you were right about the Slope of Enlightenment. But, as the usage stats mentioned above seem to show, IMHO we are still in the Trough of Disillusionment, for a pretty long time now.
I peaked into r/elm and the trolling is hilarious if not completely useless .
Wholly recommend using the Lamdera stack if someone is working on a contract project for a client. However, it’s a much much harder sell in a team setting working on a long-lived product if the team isn’t already bought into the FP paradigm.
Most senior engineer that have been around the block have heard of Elm and–for better or for worse–it’s lack of maintenance reputation precedes it.
Not only that, junior engineers that are more pliable are loathe to learn a framework/language without much “employability future”.
I’ve had both sets of conversations numerous times in the past 5-ish years and I’m pretty much tired of advocating for Elm because I get very little out of it and if anything it builds up resentment if I’m a bit too combative (my fault, sure).
I think Elm is stuck in a weird place of quiet users who enjoy it and doesn’t care it doesn’t get updated because it solves their problem, but very few new entrants to the language (not to say it’s zero). I don’t think there’s anything that’s going to be able to break it out of that “stagnation” short of an obvious killer app that turn heads. Maybe it’s what Evan’s working towards with Elm 0.20 and maybe it’s what elm.studio will eventually become. We’ll only know when it happens . In the mean time… pick your battles is what I like to say.
Side note: I’ve been able to use Lamdera to pick-up what I call “micro-gigs”. They’re in the ball park of ~$500 and can be pushed out in about a day or two’s worth of work. Wouldn’t be worth my time to have to spin up NextJS, setup NextAuth and fiddle about with all of the package.json security and deprecation warnings which alone would take me the whole day , but with Lamdera and Elm, it’s quick and painless and the clients so far have been more than happy with their solutions if only because nobody else will solve their problem for that price and speed!
Weird isn’t it. That Elm can have best in class price and development speed, and probably maintenance costs too. Yet as you say, its sort of stuck in a place where most people don’t want to know.
Knowing this makes Elm a very attractice proposition for me. But perhaps rather than wishing everybody would also like it, think of it as a secret weapon that I can use to my advantage. Its only a super power if it is only used by a minority.
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I’ve had both sets of conversations numerous times in the past 5-ish years and I’m pretty much tired of advocating for Elm because I get very little out of it and if anything it builds up resentment if I’m a bit too combative (my fault, sure).
. In the mean time… pick your battles is what I like to say.
, but with Lamdera and Elm, it’s quick and painless and the clients so far have been more than happy with their solutions if only because nobody else will solve their problem for that price and speed!