Elm in Production: 25K Lines Later
Something I find incredibly off-putting about Elm is the evangelical and generally unbalanced tone taken by many prominent members of the Elm community. I almost never come across Elm advocates accepting a valid criticism of the language. The response almost always amounts to &quot;you don&#x27;t understand&quot; or &quot;yes, but&quot;. They spend a lot of time celebrating the compiler&#x27;s humanistic virtues but seem less clearly humanist in their relation to original thinking or diversity of thought. So much of Elm community dialogue (in talks, in articles, in the Elm slack which I follow daily) is simply those with more experience initiating those with lesser experience into the &quot;Elm way&quot; of doing things. For this reason, Elm feels more like a framework with a domain specific language than a fully qualified programming language. And while it might seem like a gentle introduction to functional programming techniques, I&#x27;m not confidant that it really teaches people the concepts themselves nor gives them enough room to think critically about how to apply them. Instead, the task is to internalize and apply the &quot;Elm way&quot;. The inability to even acknowledge the unprecedented labor required simply to parse a JSON response is a perfect example of the cultish mentality emerging in this community.