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from distribution in user packages, and never intended as anything more than a stopgap measure in extremely rare cases.[2] It was /officially/ not a core language feature intended for widespread usage, and consistently advised against by the Elm team. The removal of native modules was spoken about publicly months before the breaking upgrade. It came as no surprise to me. As an engineer who tries really hard to be responsible, I do not build software which relies on features which are advertised as 'do not use unless absolutely necessary' and are soon-to-be deprecated unless I'm willing to accept the inherent risk of doing so. The core Elm team was, in my opinion, extremely communicative, well-reasoned, and thoughtful in this change and in others, despite the inconvenience to a small subset of people. For each feature discussed in Luke's post, there is an accompanying Discourse thread[3], discussion on Google groups, Github gists[4], etc., that carefully lays out the reasoning, and carefully consider the scope of a change (in the instance of the removal of custom operators, the Elm team analyzed the package ecosystem and determined less than 5% of packages were affected)[4]. I won't cover the moral arguments around the obligations of open source maintainers as this has been covered ad nauseam with the Clojure and Rust fiascos of a similar sort - though I personally believe maintainers don't owe anyone anything, and I try to treat all free software graciously, as a precious gift, lucky to receive it at all. I will say that Elm's somewhat slow, closed BDFL-ish governance is well-documented as well[5, 6], available to all who seek to understand the Elm development process and decide for themselves if this is an ecosystem to hitch their wagon to. Of course the Elm maintainers get to patch their own runtime with native modules, because they are implementing core parts of the language, it's practically tautological. That users living in userland cannot do it is not unfair; it's a language design feature. What Luke seems to see as a stifling of an open community by the closure of issues and deletion of posts on the Discourse is often basic organizational maintenance to handle redundancies. Conversations around these issues have happened for months and in some cases years, and decisions have been made. They may not be to everyone's tastes. That should be just fine! If someone went to Famous Amos Cookies on Discourse, Slack, their mailing list, and opened a Github issue and PR suggesting this genius idea they just had, it's so good, wait for it - an oatmeal cookie without raisins! - I hope they would clean it up, close the issue, delete my posts, etc., for their own sanity. Not to mention that the opening to Luke's opus here is an admission of his own rudeness to the Elm team on most of these fora. Of course the relationship with maintainers will be strained with this kind of behavior. There are critiques of Elm, to be sure. The pace of releases is somewhat slow, custom operators might be nice for 3rd party parsing libraries, it might be cool to have a PR merged in to get that fuzzy feeling only OSS contributors get. But you cannot reasonably argue that Elm's team has been unfair, discriminatory, uncommunicative, or arrogant (pathos, so much pathos here!). I don't generally post comments anywhere, but articles like this are irresponsible and damaging not just to the well-being of maintainers who are being generous with their time trying to make something with great care, but to people (like many top level commenters here) who might have tried Elm but won't due to an inside baseball post from a spurned developer. It makes me actually sad, like want-to-cry sad. [1] https://newfivefour.com/elm-lang-basic-native-module.html (any somewhat experienced Elm developer will get nervous looking at this trivial example and immediately see what might break) [2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/elm-dev/1JW6wknkDIo/H9... (2015!) [3] https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/native-code-in-0-19/826 [4] https://gist.github.com/evancz/769bba8abb9ddc3bf81d69fa80cc7... [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4EX4dPppA [6] https://github.com/elm/projects/blob/master/roadmap.md

who understood the internals well enough to manage it, while also being interested in taking it over. Now there is. Relatedly, I get that some bosses want to see a higher bus number on the compiler, but functioning teams of compiler authors don't just drop out of the sky. It's a rare specialization, and even among the few people who have the training to do major work on a compiler like Elm's, most are academically oriented and didn't go through a pH.D program so they could performance optimize Haskell code, make nice error messages even nicer, or find ways to remove language features rather than adding that cool new one they read about in a paper. There's also communication. Evan used to give lots of updates about his progress on upcoming releases, and the main effect was to delay the release. He'd announce some progress and it would instantaneously become a Q&A - at best. Often people would pressure him to give up on whatever the latest impediment was and ship something sooner. If he didn't respond to those responses to his progress update, people would complain that he was unresponsive. So doing public updates strictly increased complaint volume, which of course also takes a toll on Evan, being a human and all. > But not having an idea of what the roadmap or timeline looks like is a big deal. The two options here are: 1) Be honest 2) Try to trick bosses There isn't a world where Elm stakes out a roadmap and a release timeline and then hits it. Elm is trying to do a bunch of things differently than how they've been done before, which means each release is in some ways experimental, and also that each release changes substantially based on lessons learned from the previous release. So yeah, it'd be possible to make up a bunch of "oh yeah, Feature A is gonna come out in April, and then B will land in July" but anyone could look back a year or two later and realize that the stated roadmap had barely any relationship to what actually happened. (People would complain about that too - that Evan wasn't sticking to the roadmap he'd laid out.) We know from past releases that this is how it's gone (in my hubris, I told my editor at Manning I predicted Elm 0.19 would be out last summer) so there's no way to publish an official roadmap without knowingly misleading people. If anyone considers it a red flag that there's no official timeline, well - that's because such a timeline wouldn't mean anything anyway. Evan's approach is to be open and honest about this. [0] This is how we've ended up with a community of people who largely don't think it's a big deal: process of elimination. Everyone who considered it a deal breaker is still using JavaScript. I don't know how helpful that all is, but maybe it sheds some light on the history of some of these things. :) [0] https://github.com/elm-lang/projects/blob/master/roadmap.md