I was late to the Lua community — Lua 4.0 verging on 5.0 — but in some ways at a similar point or earlier to where Elm is trying to be given that at the time Lua conferences and talks at other conferences were not a common thing. Lua the language is controlled by three people with the implementation all being the work of one person. They clearly listen to the mailing list, but they make decisions themselves about what the language is going to be and how the implementation is going to work.
But having asserted that control over the core, the Lua team takes bug fixes very seriously and are aggressive about fixing bugs in releases while preserving the specification. Elm does not fare as well here with multiple runtime crash inducing bugs sitting for months at a time. Furthermore, Lua invested in a strong API for interoperation with native code and welcomed people writing libraries to extend it. The Lua community has struggled to have anything like the package repositories of Python or Perl — it's notorious as a batteries not included language — but there was express support as opposed to discouragement for rolling up your sleeves and extending it as you needed. (One result of Lua's friendliness to extension is that Lua is now at the core of some of the most important machine learning libraries.) Contrast this with the thin official documentation around ports and the significant limitations on how those can be used to access and work with external functionality. It feels like an "if you must but we'd really rather you didn't" situation. I don't know how the process on Python worked, but I suspect given the range of extensions to Python it was similar. Own and control the core. Be dedicated to making it as high quality as possible. Make it easy and encouraged for people to provide extensions beyond the core. Elm certainly practices the first. There are signs of trouble with respect to the second. Significant issues with regard to the third are driving people away. Mark On Tue, Apr 25, 2017 at 6:27 AM Wojciech Piekutowski < w.piekutow...@gmail.com> wrote: > The number of similar voices regarding community process and amount of > frequently requested missing features/native libraries (like binary support > and better JS interop) show a problem. No matter how amazing and performant > Elm will ever be, newcomers will be discouraged by everlasting begging for > native APIs support. > > Does anybody has an idea how other languages/platforms manage to get > community involved? I think it could be beneficial to learn from, for > example Elixir community, and borrow some good practices that could work > for Elm too. > > On Tue, 25 Apr 2017 at 05:22, Duane Johnson <duane.john...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> As several have asked, and Peter Damoc kindly reached out off-list, I'll >> post here what I wrote to him. Please know that I do appreciate what >> everyone has worked on, but this hasn't worked for me for the reasons I >> outline. I've started auto-archiving email from elm-discuss, so if you have >> any questions, please reach out to me off-list. Thanks. >> >> Hi Peter, that's kind of you to follow up off-list. >> >> I've had several pain points. I'll go over the technical ones first and >> the community ones second. >> >> In the two (and a half) projects that failed, they failed for different >> reasons but in general, because of JS interop issues. In the first project, >> I was unable to access binary data in order to represent compiled hex blobs >> as visual SVG (see https://github.com/canadaduane/elm-hccb/tree/master). >> I made a use case post here >> https://groups.google.com/d/msg/elm-discuss/spr621OlUeo/awhuqzpzBgAJ. >> >> In the second case, I was trying to create custom elements that could be >> embedded inside the QuillJS rich text editor--in other words, it wasn't >> enough just to treat Javascript as an external API, I needed to embed elm >> "things" inside a JS component inside elm. >> >> I made a third attempt to convert an AngularJS app to Elm, but didn't get >> very far in and gave up, in part because of the attitude I've felt from the >> Elm community that components are bad and have no place here (when >> everything I'm seeing in Angular is trying to be more like a component, and >> interact with the world like a component). >> >> The community aspect that has weighed heavily on me is the feeling that >> I'm not a participant in the decision-making or priority-setting. I feel >> more like a distant user, or maybe an interesting use case, from which data >> is gathered and decisions are made (by someone else, somewhere else). >> >> I hope that helps! >> >> Thanks again for your reaching out. I really look up to you and eeue56. >> >> Take care, >> Duane >> >> >> On Monday, April 24, 2017 at 4:31:08 PM UTC-6, Joe Andaverde wrote: >>> >>> Duane, >>> >>> I'm curious what the roadblocks were in the 2 of 3 you didn't have >>> success with? This could definitely help others when making their decision. >>> Also, it may provide helpful feedback to more appropriately prioritize >>> future elm platform development. >>> >>> Thanks! >>> >>> On Monday, April 24, 2017 at 8:45:57 AM UTC-5, Duane Johnson wrote: >>>> >>>> Hi all, >>>> >>>> I've decided to move on from Elm. I've only been successful in 1 of 3 >>>> projects. I'm now in a role where I need to make an important decision >>>> regarding the transition of a codebase from Angular to something else, and >>>> I don't feel like I can responsibly recommend Elm as the replacement. So I >>>> need to focus my time and effort elsewhere. >>>> >>>> If someone could please remove me as a moderator of elm-discuss it >>>> would be appreciated. >>>> >>>> If anyone is interested in taking the `canadaduane/typed-svg` project >>>> over, I'd be happy to help transition it to willing hands. >>>> >>>> Thanks, >>>> Duane Johnson >>>> aka canadaduane >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> >> -- >> >> >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Elm Discuss" group. >> >> >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to elm-discuss+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. >> >> >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> >> >> > > > > > > > > -- > > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Elm Discuss" group. > > > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to elm-discuss+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > > > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Elm Discuss" group. 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