Oh my God, I had no idea this project was still alive. I don't mean to throw any shade but I had assumed that the lid was on this turkey.

What is the point of actively choosing a web framework in the age of LLMs?

There's a lot to love about Elm, and I've written quite a bit of production code with it starting around 0.18.0. But in 2026 I'm not sure why a company would newly choose a language that hasn't otherwise been updated in nearly 7 years.

used elm between 2016-17.

it taught me a lot of things - such as simplicity. when I ended up switching to react - redux was easy to pick up cz of elm.

sadly the ecosystem never grew. but oh man elm is nice & the apps were performant.

love it see it :)

I wrote a thing in 2023 about why I'm still using Elm:

https://taylor.town/elm-2023

It's 2026, and I'm still using Elm for all the same reasons :)

As an added bonus, Claude seems to play very very nicely with Elm:

https://taylor.town/diggit-000

> ... and others are more visible features like equatable and hashable types.

I love Elm, and I love the community, but I feel a little gaslit here.

About two years ago I was experimenting with ChatGPT vibecoding a snake game in the browser in elm, because elm is my favorite language. It was rough going and I concluded at the time that LLM‘s might kill elm. Today I use elm in production and LLMs are vastly better at it, and if anything I think LLM‘s might increase elm adoption because it is the ideal language for an LLM right now. It’s a simpler language than most, it’s stable, it has an opinionated architecture built into the language which causes most code bases to be very similar to one another

I remember using Elm in one of my gigs. After I left, the client hated me. Not to forget all the drama that it had before Covid. I really want this language to succeed, but its bdfl is trying hard....

Wish them all the best, I really respected the efforts made to normify some of ideas with unapologetic mathematic names like monads and such

But then you see stuff like this https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/

The author is very charitable in their description of the Elm Core teams actions in these interactions, but you read it and they come off entirely unaccountable and dismissive. If they want to make a purely functional language locked down, you really should be upfront that they don't have time to make sure basic parts of the web ecosystem are arbitrarily locked off like i18n until they decide users of their langauge are permitted to use it after ruling out any suggestion it doesn't undermine the purity they were going for.

https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/bindings-for-intl/1264

Gonna be honest, really got the impression the maintainer here couldn't be stuffed looking to it, and wasn't personally impacted and largely didn't give a shit. Proceeds to run off some bullshit to dismiss the issue entirely about it being too risky (he had better things to do, and anyone he can delegate this too does too), the poster offers to do the work write a report, etc, etc. Then he's ghosted and for some reason the thread is shut after 10 days lol??? I guess giving him the dignity of a reply is out of the core teams hands because of how they arbitrarily configured their discourse.

Don't blame that dude for leaving Elm, glad I never made the mistake of wasting my time being dependent on its infantilizating runtime.

Look if you want to avoid being too coupled to the runtime your language exists in, sounds like a cool experiment, but maybe don't drag everyone along with you until you figure out the basic issues.

All that is 6 years ago hopefully they're more self aware.

Did the restrictions on JavaScript get resolved? IIRC, they made it so you had to use their “Ports” mechanism to interface with JavaScript, and you couldn’t write your own wrappers.

There was some drama when someone forked it so you could write your own JavaScript wrappers/FFI too?

Did they walk back that thing where certain language features could only be used by the Elm team? That seemed like a language-killer to me.

So many casualties in that period of groping around in functional programming concepts for the frontend from, like, 2014 - 2020 or so. But a lot of good things endured from that at least.

I hope to see progress in the future. I loved Elm and it made me a better programmer. Things changed a lot since then, but beauty of Elm is not matched by any language.

Also, if you ever had to refactor anything, there is no language in the world that makes it as easy to change things.

Hope to see more releases in the future.

Is it me, the code examples look awful to read?

I'm interested less in getting to Elm 1.0 than getting past Elm 0.19, which is the version that locked everyone but Elm's author out of writing native modules. Far as I can tell, that pretty well marked the end of Elm.