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Discussion summary

Discussion centered on the relevance of web frameworks like Elm in the age of LLMs, with some seeing benefits in static typing and compiler feedback, while others question its necessity.

What the discussion says

  • LLMs make choosing frameworks easier but don't change core tradeoffs.
  • Elm's strictness might be beneficial for LLM compatibility.
  • Many see no need to change existing development practices.
  • Some believe Elm is outdated or less relevant now.
“Elm might be a good fit for LLMs because it forbids taking shortcuts.”
— the_gipsy
“Statically typed languages with compiler hints are ideal for LLMs.”
— pohl

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  • Hacker News
  • I think Evan's pointing at something, and everyone's looking at the finger. I don't think this is really about Elm at all, but the preparation for Acadia.

    In his talk, Economics of Programming Languages https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8, he does reveal a peek at what he's been working on for the past seven years: a query language with functional ideas applied to them.

    He points at the boundaries in web apps that typically destroys type information: - language <-> storage - storage <-> wire

    What if we could preserve the type information across these boundaries? What would that buy us? One answer he had was easier migrations. They'd just be a type diff, rather than hand-written SQL.

    So I think the right question is, can we infer what Acadia is going to be like given the changes he's shipping with Elm? What does incremental compilation give query languages?

    by iamwil
  • 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.
    by willdr
  • 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.
    by chuckadams
  • 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
    by auslegung
  • 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?

    by lambdas
  • 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

    by surprisetalk
  • 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.
    by OhSoHumble
  • 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!

    by bbkane

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