Emphasizing /r/elm more

[Evan Czaplicki]

I recently talked with folks who moderate the various Elm discussion forums about the challenges that come up and how we can do better.

The short version is: we should start migrating more discussion to /r/elm.

Now the long version!

How Things Are Now

Long-form discussion is split between elm-discuss and /r/elm. There are a lot of regulars that spend more time on elm-discuss, but I think it's fair to say that /r/elm is much more easily accessible and "public facing" for newcomers. This creates some problems.

Problems with elm-discuss:

• Threads are linear, so it's hard for people to branch off into sub-discussions.
  
• There's no voting mechanism in elm-discuss, so topics are sorted by "are people posting?" not by "do people care?"
  
• Moderation to avoid spam is more difficult. All new users are moderated by default to avoid those awful spam robots that Google Groups does not catch.
  
• It goes to people's already full inboxes. If you change this, you use the online interface, which is not amazing.
  

Problems from having two long-form forums:

• Lots of valuable expertise only lives on elm-discuss. When new folks come to /r/elm, there are not as many folks with as much production experience.
  
• Blog posts (frequently shared on /r/elm) miss out on a lot of valuable feedback.
  

How Things Could Be

Right now I'm just suggesting that folks who are regulars here get on /r/elm and see if you like it. I'd like to start by shifting the center of gravity for community discussion.

Longer term though, things could look more like how Rust does it. It seems like /r/rust is the center of gravity for community discussion. See their sidebar! They moderate content well and have some laughs. (I personally think it's very important for moderators to be active in guiding people towards friendly discussion! That's super hard on elm-discuss.)

They also have an interesting approach to answering beginner questions that I think it'd be good to try out!

[Charlie Koster]

I just wanted to confirm one of your assertions anecdotally. In the past week I wrote two Elm blog posts and opted to post them to /r/elm rather than elm-discuss for precisely the first two bullet points you listed. A linear discussion would have been largely unhelpful and distracting.

I also wanted to reinforce the importance of good moderation. I've seen small subreddits grow and die due to a lack of moderation, but the ones that have good moderation that encourage productive discussion end up doing well.

[Mark Hamburg]

The web interface to Reddit is abysmal. Email isn't great but Reddit seems incredibly tedious.

On Mon, Jan 2, 2017 at 7:21 PM, Charlie Koster <ckos...@gmail.com> wrote:

I just wanted to confirm one of your assertions anecdotally. In the past week I wrote two Elm blog posts and opted to post them to /r/elm rather than elm-discuss for precisely the first two bullet points you listed. A linear discussion would have been largely unhelpful and distracting.

I also wanted to reinforce the importance of good moderation. I've seen small subreddits grow and die due to a lack of moderation, but the ones that have good moderation that encourage productive discussion end up doing well.

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[Nick H]

I have never really used Reddit, but I am happy to try it out! That second bullet point in particular has really been wearing down my morale lately.

Don't forget, elm-discuss still has top billing on the community page

[Peter Damoc]

On Tue, Jan 3, 2017 at 2:50 AM, Evan Czaplicki <eva...@gmail.com> wrote:

I recently talked with folks who moderate the various Elm discussion forums about the challenges that come up and how we can do better.

The short version is: we should start migrating more discussion to /r/elm.

Funny story, I wanted to take your suggestion and start a topic on /r/elm about Web Components and my 2 years quest for an Elm based UI toolkit but Focus kicked in automatically at 9 AM and locked me out of reddit until 1 PM. :) 

But I have to agree, reddit is a lot better in terms of having discussions.  

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[Herdi Bintang]

How about using Discourse? React forum and Meteor forum use it, or you can see the list here.

[Rupert Smith]

On Tuesday, January 3, 2017 at 1:51:05 AM UTC, Evan wrote:

Right now I'm just suggesting that folks who are regulars here get on /r/elm and see if you like it. I'd like to start by shifting the center of gravity for community discussion.

Sure, will give it a go.

 

[Richard Feldman]

How about using Discourse? React forum and Meteor forum use it, or you can see the list here.

At some point I heard someone point out that /r/elm is going to see use regardless, so any alternative introduced has the minimum downside of fragmenting where discussions happen.

I don't think that makes /r/elm the automatic best choice, but I do think it makes it worth a shot.

I'm planning to spend more time there.

[Rupert Smith]

On Wednesday, January 4, 2017 at 6:51:28 AM UTC, Richard Feldman wrote:

I don't think that makes /r/elm the automatic best choice, but I do think it makes it worth a shot.

I like how on google groups everyone tends to use their real name. On reddit most people post with nicknames. It feels more professional and appropriate to use real names - perhaps we'll meet each other in the flesh at a conference or something.

Will people moving to /r/elm do so using the same real name they use on here?

[John Orford]

That struck me as well - I am going to switch my name to the real one, if I can on Reddit...

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[Rupert Smith]

On Wednesday, January 4, 2017 at 12:27:11 PM UTC, John Orford wrote:

That struck me as well - I am going to switch my name to the real one, if I can on Reddit...

Or create a new account so you can keep the nickname to use when you are trolling us... :-P 

[Mark Hamburg]

Me, in my white male tech bubble, focused on user interface annoyances in Reddit. I asked around with some other developers I work with and have worked with and Reddit (along with Twitter) was viewed as a place that has been too friendly to hate speech — particularly racist and misogynist hate speech — and they were uncomfortable giving Reddit any business.

Mark

[Charlie Koster]

Mark, Reddit is what you make of it. Subreddits (such as /r/elm) are self-moderated and it's easy enough to unsubscribe from the bad ones. I think you can be rest assured that /r/elm will be devoid of hate speech.

Those are some of my subscriptions and I don't encounter any hate speech at all.

[Brian Hicks]

I understand the principle of wanting to avoid Twitter and Reddit. I feel pretty conflicted about those two services myself. But the fact remains that /r/elm is going to be a place that people go to ask questions, and if nobody is there to answer them we're giving people a really bad experience.

See also: the Go team tried to disown /r/golang for similar reasons last month. It caused a big stir and they ended up changing moderators and dropping the "official forum" status. Once people who were willing to moderate and contribute stepped up, it improved by leaps and bounds. Even the people who wanted to see it retired have remarked on the change in only half a month. I think /r/elm could see similar improvement.

Bottom line for me: the services that we build on are important, but not as important as the communities we create. Communities can move around despite services coming and going. Right now we have elm-discuss, Slack, and /r/elm. Discourse is awesome, but as Richard pointed out it would only fragment those fora further.

[Rex van der Spuy]

On Wednesday, January 4, 2017 at 12:05:33 PM UTC-5, Brian Hicks wrote:

the fact remains that /r/elm is going to be a place that people go to ask questions, and if nobody is there to answer them we're giving people a really bad experience.

That was my problem: When I started learning Elm I first posted questions on /r/elm. 

But, I soon found I received many more, and better, replies here on elm-discuss, so I hardly visit /r/elm anymore.

I think for this move to work need to somehow pull the plug on elm-discuss.

Maybe we should set a kill date, and then after that just lock down this list for good with a big sign saying "Please visit /r/elm"...?

[Mark Hamburg]

I, in my ungrammatical bubble, should perhaps use some Elm-based software to keep me from becoming too casual in my writing. :-P

[Mark Hamburg]

I'm well aware that the Elm subreddit can and will be moderated. The view point I was hearing and relaying was basically a political statement about choosing not to support Reddit.

Mark

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[Mark Hamburg]

I agree that this only works if elm-discuss gets killed. It might, however, be necessary to also kill elm-dev because the leakage of elm-discuss traffic over into elm-dev will likely become much worse if elm-discuss goes away.

Mark

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[Martin DeMello]

I would argue very strongly against killing elm-discuss. I'm a heavy reddit user, and I think it simply lacks the features necessary to support mailing-list-style discussions:

1. if you subscribe to a lot of subreddits, there is no guarantee you'll be shown new posts from /r/elm in your front page. gmail lets me see a list of folders in my sidebar with unread-thread counts for each, so I never have to think about specifically opening up elm-discuss to check if something new has been posted

2. there is no good way to see the messages you have and haven't already read within a thread. (there are browser plugins that try to help with this but don't do a particularly good job; it's a hard problem to solve from the outside)

3. you get a notification if someone replies to you, but not if someone replies to that reply.

4. searching through old conversation is really hard

martin

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[br...@brianthicks.com]

Killing elm-discuss is outside the scope of the discussion. The point is to emphasize an underused watering hole, not kill an existing one that works well for a subset of the community.

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[Mark Hamburg]

At least going through the mental exercise of "would you move elm-dev to reddit" is a way to avoid the frequently fallacious mental trap of "I wouldn't do this, but others should". In fact, for any move to any other system, it might actually be a good thing for elm-dev to lead the way. That way, the argument could be made "we're using it for Elm development discussions and it's working great".

Mark

[Mark Hamburg]

So, this is really about "please go look at /r/elm too"?

Mark

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[br...@brianthicks.com]

I can't speak to Evan's original intent in posting, but that's what I'd like to see people do.

[Rupert Smith]

On Wednesday, January 4, 2017 at 7:00:34 PM UTC, Martin DeMello wrote:

2. there is no good way to see the messages you have and haven't already read within a thread. (there are browser plugins that try to help with this but don't do a particularly good job; it's a hard problem to solve from the outside)

Yeah, I notice that. With google groups I tend to "mark all as read" then when I come back tomorrow I can straight away see new stuff. I look into the topics that interest me, then "mark all as read" again when I am done. As far as keeping up with discussions go, I'm not sure reddit really does have a better UI than google groups. 

[Wojciech S. Czarnecki]

Dnia 2017-01-02, o godz. 17:50:41
Evan Czaplicki <eva...@gmail.com> napisał(a):

> I recently talked with folks who moderate the various Elm discussion forums
> about the challenges that come up and how we can do better.
>

> The short version is: *we should start migrating more discussion to /r/elm
> <https://www.reddit.com/r/elm/>.*

In short version: then I am off.

> Now the long version!

> I think it's fair to say that /r/elm is much more easily
> accessible and "public facing" for newcomers.

So let r/elm be a first-help channel for the newcomers. Who in the sticky
(pinned in r-lingo iirc) faq will be given links to mail clients and to
books how to use a mail client andThen directed here.


> Problems with elm-discuss:
>
> - Threads are linear, so it's hard for people to branch off into
> sub-discussions.

Excuse me, both my email clients (claws/mutt) show elm-* threads perfectly.
Unlike reddit or g-groups web [.expl.] half baked things.

> - There's no voting mechanism in elm-discuss, so topics are sorted by

> "are people posting?" not by "do people care?"

This is NOT a problem on a mail list for someone who is subscribed to the
list. Alas 'do people care' in terms of 'stars' or 'upvotes' or anything else
similar is - at least for me - against the user. It makes some topics
fashionable/hot and these are (in web interfaces) on top. Important,
valuable, hard topics are pushed off the sight of the web interface user.

In contrary, on the mailing list one at least sees the 'Subject' line of
recently posted threads. And then have it avaliable for grep.

> - Moderation to avoid spam is more difficult. All new users are

> moderated by default to avoid those awful spam robots that Google Groups
> does not catch.

This is NOT a problem for someone subscribed to a mail list. I am not that
long here - my grep '^From\s' march/elm*|wc -l shows 1957 messages (both
-discuss and -dev) - and NO single piece of spam is there.

> - It goes to people's already full inboxes. If you change this, you use

> the online interface, which is not amazing.

It goes straight to its dedicated maildir via miracle of ol' pale procmail.
The same miracle g-tags can do for gmail users; in easy clickable way.

> Problems from having two long-form forums:
>

> - Lots of valuable expertise *only* lives on elm-discuss. When new folks

> come to /r/elm, there are not as many folks with as much production
> experience.

So let someone (a pinned faq post?) there direct newcomers here.
Possibly with a word about things that existed before web (like
aforementioned e-mail clients).

> - Blog posts (frequently shared on /r/elm) miss out on a lot of valuable
> feedback.

As above: tell people to post links also here, eg. with customary [BLOG] tag.

> They also have an interesting approach to answering beginner questions

> <https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5ljizz/is_there_a_rust_equivalent_to_rlearnpython/>
> that

Yep. Pinned posts are good to tell people that there is a thing called email
and it can be used to post and receive valuable information about elm :).

TL;DR. r/elm should exist as an entry point for the newcomers. elm-discuss
should stay for real discussions.

P.S. Thanks for keeping Elm simple :)

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[Brian Hicks]

>> - Moderation to avoid spam is more difficult. All new users are
>> moderated by default to avoid those awful spam robots that Google
>> Groups
>> does not catch.
>
> This is NOT a problem for someone subscribed to a mail list. I am not
> that
> long here - my grep '^From\s' march/elm*|wc -l shows 1957 messages
> (both
> -discuss and -dev) - and NO single piece of spam is there.

As one of the people who approves every post from a new author manually,
and just did for yours… well, maybe that’s why. The spam is a
problem.

[Wojciech S. Czarnecki]

Dnia 2017-01-04, o godz. 19:44:41
"Brian Hicks" <br...@brianthicks.com> napisał(a):

> >> - Moderation to avoid spam is more difficult. All new users are

> As one of the people who approves every post
> from a new author manually

OK. I misread. First post must be checked anyway and that can be a burden
with a volume.

I went a bit ballistic, because all these BB based venues are abysmal and
gobble time. Take my sincere apologies.

[Rupert Smith]

On Wednesday, January 4, 2017 at 7:00:34 PM UTC, Martin DeMello wrote:

I'm a heavy reddit user, and I think it simply lacks the features necessary to support mailing-list-style discussions:

You can't quote when replying.

I like newsgroups so much better then /r/elm. I like the old fashioned feel of them, the anarchic style, the freedom to be conversational or express myself however I like within the confines of ASCII. There is still something of the old attitude of usenet alive in them that just seems to be lacking on the alternatives. I take great pride in quoting carefully, replying to multiple questions with responses in-line underneath, not top posting and so on. In other words newsgroups or mailing lists take bit of work and manners to operate successfully and that all contributes to making a community.

A few thoughts for you:

Having a split community might actually be a good thing. For one, there are enough people interested that >1 splinter of this community is alive concurrently. That in itself is an achievement because something needs to reach a certain size for that to happen. Also it makes the community as a whole more resilient - if one splinter dies out, others may carry on.

Removing duplication is a good thing for code - but for community growth and engagement, perhaps it isn't.

So I'm just going to keep on posting here, because it is the best place for me and I've had plenty interesting and helpful responses.

Also, what about this:

http://elm-news.com/

Perfect for keeping up-to-date with multiple channels. All it needs is user accounts or to use local storage so it can keep track of what you have read or not.

[Joey Eremondi]

My main hesitation about reddit is that, even on the best-case subs like /r/rust, newcomer posts tends to get downvoted or ignored.

Here, if a newcomer posts a basic question, many people will ignore them, but the poster doesn't know that. Someone will post a solution, or a link to one, and they will be on their way. On /r/elm, they see their post sitting at 1,0 or -1 votes, and and up feeling like newcomer questions aren't welcome, and are more likely to try to find a tool with a more friendly community.

My vote would be for Discourse or something similar. I think being able to sticky posts would remove a lot of the redundant messages we see on this list, and being able to sort by subject would make it easier for people to see what they're most interested in.

[Brian Hicks]

Here, if a newcomer posts a basic question, many people will ignore them, but the poster doesn't know that. Someone will post a solution, or a link to one, and they will be on their way. On /r/elm, they see their post sitting at 1,0 or -1 votes, and and up feeling like newcomer questions aren't welcome, and are more likely to try to find a tool with a more friendly community.

I’m planning to do a sticky post on /r/elm every week in the vein of the Rust “easy questions” post. You’re right that this happens, and this seems to be a nice way around it.

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[Håkon Rossebø]

I would also prefer a solution like Discourse or similar as this seems to work very good for elixirforum.com. Anyway, if the focus should be moved to /r/elm, I would suggest we change the elm-discuss group heading to include a link to /r/elm with some description.

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[OvermindDL1]

I'd still not recommend reddit, it has no mailing list support.  Here or Discourse both act well as a forum (though discourse more so) and as a mailing list both, so either works.

[Rupert Smith]

On Friday, January 13, 2017 at 3:20:24 PM UTC, OvermindDL1 wrote:

I'd still not recommend reddit, it has no mailing list support.  Here or Discourse both act well as a forum (though discourse more so) and as a mailing list both, so either works.

I agree, /r/elm should point here for beginners advice (or this Discourse thing that we all try to imagine into existence).  Then /r/elm should be for posting interesting articles or pumping your latest blog post.

[Matthieu Pizenberg]

I would also like to keep something like this group. The fact that every one get a chance to be read by the community (without being downvoted or just ignored) is very important. A few times in Stack Overflow I have asked somewhat hard/specific questions with nobody caring answering it because it wasn't popular. I fear that Reddit might be the same. But I'm not a Reddit user so I don't know.

Also agree with many elm-discuss arguments given including (but not exclusively) :
 - visibility of what I have already read
 - getting emailed when there is an answer in a discussion I'm in
 - real people names

I strongly feel that the wealth of this discussion group is due to the fact that the community likes it, and of course thanks to the great spam filtering done for first posts. So encouraging people to change to reddit might no be a good idea. If the spam really is a problem, is there a mecanism to involve more the community for this control?

In my opinion, the active community here is very useful and I would have loved to be redirected here earlier than I was. I only knew about the elm slack initially. And may be the same for some newcomers from reddit who don't know about this group?

[Tomáš Znamenáček]

Sorry if this is an offtopic direction, but I (as a newcomer) would also like Discourse best. It has an e-mail interface, very good UI, spam controls, trust system, community moderation tools, healthy development speed, and could be installed under a custom domain name (like discuss.elm-lang.org) to give it more visibility. I think it could be a good fit both for newbies and advanced users. It would probably need some money to run (be it a separate server or hosted instance), but I think we could easily raise that.

If solving the two forums situation by introducing a third one (and maybe deprecating the first two) is out of the question, just tell me.

T.

[Matthieu Pizenberg]

Hi again, since this is not the first time that this matter is discussed, and since this time Evan launched it, it means that it is an important matter for the community and it's going to evolve anytime soon ^^. So, instead of discussing it here with passion and obvious bias since we are on the mailing list, what would you think of asking the questions to all the community in a more objective way?

What I think of is for example a google form like the one below, that would be accessible from all the community entry points (slack, reddit, mailing list, ...). Please tell if you like the idea, or not. (sorry for the long post XD)


# Community Checkpoint Form

--------------- PROFILE

What is your experience with elm ?
 - New here
 - Not so much experience (1-2 completed projects)
 - Start feeling confident (understand most of it, multiple successful projects)
 - Total expert (yeah I even master effect managers, native code, etc.)

Are you familiar with functional programming?
 - What is that?
 - I know the basics
 - Yes I use it regurlarly
 - Peace of cake, I'm currently doing a PhD on homotopy type theory for functional programming

--------------- COMMUNITY

Some description here to introduce the dilemna between Reddit, Google Groups (alias mailing list), and something else dedicated (let's say a Discourse).

Did you know about:
 o The elm Reddit?
 o The elm Slack?
 o The elm discussion group (mailing list)?

Are you currently a Reddit user?
 - No
 - Yes, sometimes
 - Yes, everytime

Are you currently a Google Groups user?
 - No
 - Yes, sometimes
 - Yes, everytime

Are you currently using a Discourse forum?
 - No
 - Yes, sometimes
 - Yes, everytime

Rank your preferences between those:
 1. elm Reddit
 1. elm discussion group (mailing list)
 1. elm Discourse

(If you ranked first Reddit) would you volunteer to help with the moderation?
 - yes/no
(If you ranked first the mailing list) would you volunteer to help with the moderation?
 - yes/no
(If you ranked first Discourse) would you volunteer to help with the creation, funding of the server, or moderation of this forum?
 - yes/no

(If you answered yes to one of the previous volunteering questions) please give us details of what you would like to do and a way to contact you in case this might go further:
------------
|            |
------------

Anything you would like to add?
------------
|            |
------------

On Tuesday, January 3, 2017 at 2:51:05 AM UTC+1, Evan wrote:

I recently talked with folks who moderate the various Elm discussion forums about the challenges that come up and how we can do better.

The short version is: we should start migrating more discussion to /r/elm.

Now the long version!

How Things Are Now

Long-form discussion is split between elm-discuss and /r/elm. There are a lot of regulars that spend more time on elm-discuss, but I think it's fair to say that /r/elm is much more easily accessible and "public facing" for newcomers. This creates some problems.

Problems with elm-discuss:

• Threads are linear, so it's hard for people to branch off into sub-discussions.
  

• There's no voting mechanism in elm-discuss, so topics are sorted by "are people posting?" not by "do people care?"
  

• Moderation to avoid spam is more difficult. All new users are moderated by default to avoid those awful spam robots that Google Groups does not catch.
  

• It goes to people's already full inboxes. If you change this, you use the online interface, which is not amazing.
  

Problems from having two long-form forums:

• Lots of valuable expertise only lives on elm-discuss. When new folks come to /r/elm, there are not as many folks with as much production experience.
  

• Blog posts (frequently shared on /r/elm) miss out on a lot of valuable feedback.
  

How Things Could Be

Right now I'm just suggesting that folks who are regulars here get on /r/elm and see if you like it. I'd like to start by shifting the center of gravity for community discussion.

Longer term though, things could look more like how Rust does it. It seems like /r/rust is the center of gravity for community discussion. See their sidebar! They moderate content well and have some laughs. (I personally think it's very important for moderators to be active in guiding people towards friendly discussion! That's super hard on elm-discuss.)

They also have an interesting approach to answering beginner questions that I think it'd be good to try out!

[Brian Hicks]

This will be part of the State of Elm survey. It goes live this week, and I'll post a new thread here when it does. It doesn't go into quite as much detail as your post because we're already pushing the length limit. That said, this is what I've got for this:

Which of the following do you read / contribute to?

- Elm Slack

- elm-discuss mailing list

- elm-dev mailing list

- Twitter discussions

- Facebook groups

- Elm subreddit

- Elm weekly newsletter

- Elm town podcast

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[Matthieu Pizenberg]

Cool! it will provide first insights of/for the community I hope. However, if we really want to understand how the community should evolve, I think that another, more detailed survey on this specific matter will be needed at some point.

[Brian Hicks]

Just a note: we've "stolen" the weekly beginners / easy question thread concept from the Rust subreddit. We're into week three now: https://www.reddit.com/r/elm/comments/5of78c/easy_questions_beginners_thread_week_of_20170116/

Just to tie this back to our discussion about beginners questions going unanswered. Working on it. :)

[Rex van der Spuy]

On Monday, January 23, 2017 at 9:33:57 AM UTC-5, Brian Hicks wrote:

Just a note: we've "stolen" the weekly beginners / easy question thread concept from the Rust subreddit. We're into week three now: https://www.reddit.com/r/elm/comments/5of78c/easy_questions_beginners_thread_week_of_20170116/

Just to tie this back to our discussion about beginners questions going unanswered. Working on it. :)

I've noticed that - it's a brilliant idea, thanks so much! 

[Brian Hicks]

I've noticed that - it's a brilliant idea, thanks so much!

Credit where credit is due: Evan asked me to look into this and specifically mentioned he thought the beginners thread was a good idea. I'm just implementing. :)

[Richard Feldman]

Worth noting that the top thread on elm-discuss for several weeks has been largely about languages other than Elm, and the Elm-specific parts have primarily consisted of lobbying Evan for reprioritization through a frustrating mix of misinformation and wild speculation. I don't see a way to avoid beginners clicking through and being misinformed by what's being said there, other than responding myself, which further contributes to its being bumped to the top of the list.

That thread has singlehandedly convinced me we should move away from elm-discuss. Actively rewarding the lowest-quality discussions is really bad. :(

[Joey Eremondi]

+1.

My previous concerns basically go away if the "core" elm people make an effort to upvote newbie threads and comments on the weekly beginner thread. If new people get ~5 upvotes, that should be enough to make them not feel excluded.

But yeah, moderation, pinned FAQs/guidelines, and all that good stuff would be an improvement.

On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 6:45 PM, Richard Feldman <richard....@gmail.com> wrote:

Worth noting that the top thread on elm-discuss for several weeks has been largely about languages other than Elm, and the Elm-specific parts have primarily consisted of lobbying Evan for reprioritization through a frustrating mix of misinformation and wild speculation. I don't see a way to avoid beginners clicking through and being misinformed by what's being said there, other than responding myself, which further contributes to its being bumped to the top of the list.

That thread has singlehandedly convinced me we should move away from elm-discuss. Actively rewarding the lowest-quality discussions is really bad. :(

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[Rupert Smith]

On Tuesday, January 24, 2017 at 2:45:56 AM UTC, Richard Feldman wrote:

That thread has singlehandedly convinced me we should move away from elm-discuss. Actively rewarding the lowest-quality discussions is really bad. :(

+1

Fine, but not for /r/elm please... something better. A bb where you can have a forum for beginners and pin posts, but where there is also a space for "new insights and mad ideas".

[Rex van der Spuy]

On Monday, January 23, 2017 at 9:45:56 PM UTC-5, Richard Feldman wrote:

Worth noting that the top thread on elm-discuss for several weeks has been largely about languages other than Elm, and the Elm-specific parts have primarily consisted of lobbying Evan for reprioritization through a frustrating mix of misinformation and wild speculation. I don't see a way to avoid beginners clicking through and being misinformed by what's being said there, other than responding myself, which further contributes to its being bumped to the top of the list.

I totally agree, elm-discuss is a really, really scary place for beginners! 

And, it's impossible for beginners (... or even me sometimes!...) to distinguish fact from fiction.

[Gage Peterson]

Totally agree. Reddit here I come.

Also, I feel we really need to treat Evan like the awesome leader he is. Give the guy a break. He's making one of the best languages I've ever used.

[Rupert Smith]

On Friday, January 27, 2017 at 5:36:38 AM UTC, Gage Peterson wrote:

Also, I feel we really need to treat Evan like the awesome leader he is. Give the guy a break. He's making one of the best languages I've ever used.

+1 to that. I am very much enjoying working with Elm, it has re-invigorated my interest in programming.

I learned ML at uni, but that was 20 years ago. It seemed to me at the time that it was a revolution that would be 20 years coming. I think Elm is well positioned, being simple, yet very practical. It may not have type classes like Haskell, but it sets itself apart from 'academic languages' by dispensing with some of the fancier features to appeal to a more mainstream audience.

20 years a Java programmer, and now I finally find a use for all that stuff my professors taught me, which quite honestly I have never used since finishing my university projects. Awesome effort Evan Czaplicki.

[Rex van der Spuy]

On Friday, January 27, 2017 at 12:36:38 AM UTC-5, Gage Peterson wrote:

Totally agree. Reddit here I come.

Also, I feel we really need to treat Evan like the awesome leader he is. Give the guy a break. He's making one of the best languages I've ever used.

Triple +++

Elm is the only language/software project that I know if where each new release is about removing features and increasing simplicity.

That's astonishing - Bravo!

And, extremely wise, long-term decisions are made that are right for the language, without being distracted by the current coding fashions of the moment.

Elm doesn't ever need to be mainstream - it just needs to be the best language it can be for the people like us who love using it.

Evan has completely won my trust over the year and half I've been using Elm, so whatever he recommends, I'm in! :)

And, I hope he always remains the sole maintainer and developer of the language, because, frankly, I just don't trust anyone else :)

[Duane Johnson]

On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 10:52 AM, Rex van der Spuy <dandy...@gmail.com> wrote:

And, I hope he always remains the sole maintainer and developer of the language, because, frankly, I just don't trust anyone else :)

Gosh, I hope not, because that would mean he failed to teach anyone else how to replicate Elm's leadership success.

[Matthieu Pizenberg]

Yep he definitely should evan-gelize more. ... (OK I'm out)

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