No doubt everything could've been learned and heeded by now, I think it's really, really, really hard to say "OK, so then everyone should go and try to raise $4000/mo for the new project they have." Even just using a programming language is an investment of time and trust, too, lest you want to wind up stranded on some-old-version-of-Elm island with tens of thousands of lines of code.
Elm also seemed very promising in the beginning, and honestly I don't even think that comment is so abhorrent on its own. I think Elm died the death of a thousand cuts. If it had only been one errant comment somewhere, it would've been mostly forgotten about by now. Instead, it's Elm that's mostly forgotten about.
So I say best of luck, but also... No thanks for now.
edit: Just so it's completely clear, I am actually implying that "maintainers being dicks" was actually not the problem with Elm. I think people just got especially infuriated by it because they were sick of trying to deal with Elm's breaking changes, of which this represented one. I remember going through and learning Elm and like literally months later everything was completely different and I no longer knew how to make a basic hello world application (around 0.16 or 0.17 maybe? Can't recall. I just remember that effects had changed a fair bit.) I know that to some degree this is the nature of a 0.x product, but at some point it's like "OK... then who is supposed to even use this?" Among other issues of course.
This is how I feel too. Sure, it was 5 years ago and things might have changed, but there are a ton of other technologies and languages to learn, so why not learn something without all of that previous drama? These things indeed might take a significant time inventment so I'll just focus on something I know might be more interesting or durable.
I would not even have known about this drama without the person who reminded us of it. That said, I still do not care about it at all.
Imagine me not using Linux because of Linus being harsh (yet educative) to some people... or not using OpenBSD because of Theo... or not using Common Lisp because of #lisp... :P I have received some hostile feedback personally, but they were in the right. I did not take it to heart but I learned from it.
That said, I have checked the edit history and I cannot see what the fuss is about. Welp. Moving on.
It's very easy to say this having not invested anything into Elm and not been there. I'm just thankful that most of what I invested in Elm was only time, and we never actually wound up deploying Elm to the frontend.
Forget about all of the drama, imagine if you used Linux and it stopped updating at 2.6. Elm has been at 0.19 since 2018, and that's not because there's nothing left to improve on.
> imagine if you used Linux and it stopped updating at 2.6. Elm has been at 0.19 since 2018, and that's not because there's nothing left to improve on.
Elm also seemed very promising in the beginning, and honestly I don't even think that comment is so abhorrent on its own. I think Elm died the death of a thousand cuts. If it had only been one errant comment somewhere, it would've been mostly forgotten about by now. Instead, it's Elm that's mostly forgotten about.
So I say best of luck, but also... No thanks for now.
edit: Just so it's completely clear, I am actually implying that "maintainers being dicks" was actually not the problem with Elm. I think people just got especially infuriated by it because they were sick of trying to deal with Elm's breaking changes, of which this represented one. I remember going through and learning Elm and like literally months later everything was completely different and I no longer knew how to make a basic hello world application (around 0.16 or 0.17 maybe? Can't recall. I just remember that effects had changed a fair bit.) I know that to some degree this is the nature of a 0.x product, but at some point it's like "OK... then who is supposed to even use this?" Among other issues of course.