Is Elm going stale?

[LondonTokyo]

so....

Its now been a year since the last Elm release, and there has been no updates in Github for 3 months, as far as I can see. Last blog update was about Google Summer of code. 

Seems to me that Elm is danger of becoming abandoned, and is going stale. It certainly does not seem like it is something worth investing any time on, nor does it seem safe to write any application in Elm anymore. 

Don't get me wrong, I love Elm, I think it solves some great problems elegantly. But where is it heading? What's the roadmap? Why are there no / little communication / publication from the maintainer(s)?

Or did I miss something?

Thoughts?

H

[Brian Hicks]

There are a lot of answers to that question here: https://github.com/elm-lang/projects/blob/master/roadmap.md

Even if the language were not being actively developed (which it is) the community is thriving and I would hope makes the investment in using the language worthwhile. :)

[Frank Bonetti]

Is the roadmap reliable though?. It states that the major focus of 0.19 will be single-page apps, and that features such as server-side rendering, tree shaking, code splitting, and lazy loading may be introduced. However, a status update was posted in elm-dev in July and it made no mention of single-page apps. The next release seems to be focused on improving the implementation of Core functions. I asked Evan if the stated priorities of 0.19 had changed but didn't get a response. Based on the roadmap you would think that 0.19 would introduce some major new features but it's shaping up to be more of an incremental release. That's fine with me personally (I'm don't necessarily need stuff like code splitting), but it would be nice if the roadmap was updated to reflect those changes in direction.

[Brian Hicks]

The roadmap is still accurate. Evan talked about this at elm-conf, and we will be releasing the video with 0.19 (it goes into a lot of "why?" and mirrors the roadmap nicely.)

I can't speak to major language features, but Evan is still working on Elm full-time. The language is alive and kicking. I know it's hard to see that progress sometimes, but it's definitely happening!

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[Peter Damoc]

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 8:11 PM, LondonTokyo <hen...@sparklingideas.co.uk> wrote:

Its now been a year since the last Elm release, and there has been no updates in Github for 3 months, as far as I can see. 

Last update in the dev branch of the core was about an hour ago. The master branch does not show the actual story of current development. 

 

Seems to me that Elm is danger of becoming abandoned, and is going stale. It certainly does not seem like it is something worth investing any time on, nor does it seem safe to write any application in Elm anymore. 

Elm is in no danger of being abandoned because of the gigantic investment made by NoRedInk. They have a huge Elm codebase and as long as this company exists, Elm should be fine. 

 

But where is it heading? What's the roadmap? Why are there no / little communication / publication from the maintainer(s)?

There is no actual roadmap and very little is know about the direction of the language. In July 0.19 looked imminent, now I would not put money on a bet that we will see 0.19 this year.  

I think the best way to approach Elm is to consider it feature complete now.
If what it currently offers is enough for you, use it.
If you hope to get some missing functionality, I think it is safer to chose something else. 

If you want to use it in a different domain than the one currently supported, again... it is safer to go with something else. 

--

There is NO FATE, we are the creators.
blog: http://damoc.ro/

[Peter Damoc]

On Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 8:50 PM, Brian Hicks <br...@brianthicks.com> wrote:

Even if the language were not being actively developed (which it is) the community is thriving and I would hope makes the investment in using the language worthwhile. :)

If one learns a language for some toy project is one thing.
If one evaluates a language for potential use in production code, the requirements are very different. 

Concerns about a language going stale sound to me as fitting the second category.