We had some big Elm proponents who were trying hard to convince the company to use Elm, including doing proof of concept buildouts in Elm.

Then the 0.18 to 0.19 Elm drama happened: The core team restricted the ability for users to do any native JavaScript interop, which broke every Elm app that needed any functionality that wasn’t in the core library.

It split the Elm fans into two groups: Those who were upset that they had invested in a language that now pulled the rug out from under them, and those who were true believers who told us that they trusted the Elm team’s decisions and we all needed to chill out and wait for them to address our needs, which they thought would happen soon. That was 7 years ago. There were some attempts to spin the lack of updates as “Look how mature and stable it is!” but you don’t have to look very deep to see that they just stopped working on it.

Last time I went back to look at it there were several Elm forks, some maintained by former members of the Elm core team that were more active but never caught on. With the way the core team broke important functionality, ignored the user base, and then abandoned the project for years there is no way I would ever allow this near a production website. I know that will earn me some downvotes from the die-hard Elm fans, but I think it’s important context for anyone who finds themself in a situation where Elm is being proposed for an internal project. It was always interesting as an experimental niche framework, but not as something I’d ever want near a product that I had to maintain. Especially not something that had to survive across developer turnover when your company’s main Elm proponent left and the language was abandoned for years.