[ambrozk]

It's incredible that on just about every piece I've ever read about Elm since they made that decision, this has been the first, second, and third comment. Wanting to try Elm for myself, I disregarded this advice, and.... immediately ran into the exact same problem! I've never seen such a promising project so conclusively killed by pure developer pigheadedness. And, amazingly, they've never backed down at all. They don't seem to mind that they maimed themselves.

[pavlov]

A purity pledge is very typical of cults. It's both a filter and an enforcement mechanism.

This may not apply to Elm. But I imagine it can feel easier and more rewarding to manage a community that's more like a cult than a typical free-for-all open source project.

[truculent]

I think it’s probably harder and less rewarding to manage a community where you’re constantly taking flak for a technical decision people don’t like (and which those people generally don’t engage with the pros and cons of said decision!)

[savanaly]

Out of curiosity, what did you try to do that you hit that issue right away? I've been writing Elm apps as side projects for years, and never even come close to the kernel thing being a problem. My apps are mostly graphically undemanding games and helper tools. What are the types of applications where this becomes an issue right away?

[lolc]

In my case, it was a regex supplied by the user. Elm 0.18 had no support for constructing a regex at run-time. So I made a package that wraps native RegExp. When 0.19 was released, I couldn't upgrade because of those 5 lines. The regex package eventually got regex.fromstring(). So I could've upgraded. But at the time I was bumping against limits accessing Intl and I really hated the prospect of begging some maintainer for access to a browser api.

Elm was the most fun I ever had developing a browser app. Then they decided I shouldn't be allowed to develop a ShootMyFoot module, and it stopped being fun overnight.

[matsemann]

Most likely they didn't understand Ports and immediately wanted to reach for kernel stuff.