Road to Elm 1.0

I think of Elm more as an incredibly influential research language these days.

It's very focused, there's no public roadmap or official support and the leadership (which is far as I can tell is just Evan) is uninterested in most (any?) community building or core team building.

But MAN is it nice to work in. This has resulted in several forks/spin-offs. At the recent Gleam conference, Louis Pilfold joked that every Elm user maintains their own compiler :). There are at least 6 of them (two more got announced in the last month, even as the community keeps shrinking).

So I'm glad Evan is now working towards 1.0. Maybe folks can call Elm "finished" and one of the successors can do the hard work of unifying some of the forks and growing the community.

Personally, the next time I'm looking for an Elm-like thing, I'm going to check out Gleam + Lustre. Seems to have a nice mix of maintainers that care about community and design. And it works on frontend + backend!

I can’t think of a worse announcement for your road to 1.0. Who cares? Without localization or accessibility support, it doesn’t make sense to call your UI framework production ready with a 1.0 version. I think limiting what third-party contributors can bridge from browser APIs killed Elm’s momentum for anything but toy projects. It now seems more like a sandbox for Evan to play around with compiler ideas than something meant for production use.

I had dinner with Evan at Scala Days last year and had no idea who he was until he casually mentioned Elm. He is delightful and had some great insights on the philosophy behind Elm and on programming languages in general to share.

I have little personal opinion on the state of Elm in prod (the little front end I do is as boring as it gets), but I’m glad to hear the language is still active.

Any insight on comparing Elm to Yew?

I once wrote a frontend webapp with Elm. And with backend server in Clojure, it made as much sense as Elm five years ago, right? :)

For the past two years I've instead used Yew, a rust crate for building UIs. It can look like react or like Elm, it's up to you for how you yews it ;0)

My latest app uses The Elm Architecture in Yew. It has been fantastic.

I think the biggest benefit Elm has over Yew is its access to the node js ecosystem through Port. You can interface with any npm package if you (or your AI) can write a port for it.

So far my best integration with yew dev has been using inline script tags (eek!) where I have to inject some external JS.

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

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?

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

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.

I'm interested less in getting to Elm 1.0 than getting past Elm 0.19, which is the version that locked out all native modules that weren't officially blessed by Elm's author. Far as I can tell, that pretty well marked the end of Elm.

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.

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.

I almost fell off my chair! Elm is easily my favourite language, and I didn't think it'd ever get another update. Thanks Evan!

Back in my undergrad, I took a Functional Programming class taught in Elm. It was primarily about functional data structures, but we also got to build a web app using Elm towards the end.

At the time, I didn't think much of it -- I was probably busy learning React and JavaScript and yada yada for employment purposes.

Now, having spent some time in industry and having used some gargantuan web frameworks, I find myself missing Elm. MVC in Elm is wonderfully straight-forward and easy to reason about.

Congrats on the road to 1.0! Glad to see Elm still active all these years later.

Looks like for the first time in 7 years https://iselmdead.info/ is accurate.

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.

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.

We're now migrating to React, but have some very large Elm projects still in prod.

The biggest thing for me from practical perspective was to "freeze" some pieces of DOM to be guaranteed to not change/re-created, so that it plays well with some external JS libraries expecting some nodes to not change and stay vanilla.

Another is ability to extend Elm's debugger to filter out big noisy data to keep it usable for our project.

Third is when your data is too big -- it just sometimes fails with "recursion limit" that's hard to debug due to the nature of the langauge.

Otherwise – it's a very beautiful little language that still feels quite modern and easy to work with IMO.

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....

On the subject of functional languages with JS as a compilation target, is anyone still using PureScript?

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.

It's been some years since I last heard about Elm, but I still rememeber how it blew me away when I first saw it

Worth noting there are some Elm to native code compiler projects now.

> ... 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.

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

love it see it :)

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.

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.

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