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Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

> That's really reductive and biased against us, the potential user base of Elm that decided not to engage.

My complaint isn't that you or anyone doesn't engage with Elm, that's your prerogative, of course.

My problem is that a small segment of people do engage with it whenever it comes up to smear the project in general or Evan in particular for nothing worse than wanting to run his own project his own way.

He's not an ogre? I mean here he is, look, he semms nice enough to me? "The Economics of Programming Languages" by Evan Czaplicki (Strange Loop 2023) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8

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As far as I've seen, there was no attack on the person.

What I usually see are warnings about what happened to the project and how it is run, mostly targeted to the unaware. This is a sign of respect to people's time before they waste it on something that might disappoint them when they get to know the details.

Every time Elm comes up people climb out of the woodwork to cast aspersions on it for no better reason than that Evan wants to run his project his way. Some people evidently just can't accept that and have sustained a grudge that drives them to comment on it whenever it comes up.

Look, I get it, I'm still sore about Google Feed Reader, 'member that?

But enough is enough. It's old news. Get over it. Etc.

It's like if every time someone mentioned Caddy server there was someone bringing up that time Matt Holt put that header in and pissed off a bunch of people. Life goes on. We forgive and let things go.

It's high time for folks to forgive Evan for his mistakes. I mean, he's very young still, eh? Cut the guy some slack already?

Again, the things I read are not personal, grudges or inability to accept someone's personal choices. For starters, you write his name more than anyone else here. You're not doing him any favor specially when it comes to Streisand Effect.

When I propose a tool to my CTO I couldn't care less about the project's leadership personal choices.

Mature engineers think in terms of ROI, dependability, bus factor, predictability, funding, mind-share, hiring ease, license, etc.

But it would be naive and unprofessional of me to handwave technical issues with the tools. And ALL tools have hard edges and undesirable characteristics.

And putting a header in a HTTP server is not proportional as restricting who can change the source code of a compiler.

Matt Holt is awesome btw. And so is Elm author.

Evan wants to control the technology. That's a management decision that makes it unfit for purpose. This is a legitimate criticism that had long ranging impacts. I have seen no reason, no commitment from the management side, to believe this won't happen again. It is worth bringing up when there are similar alternatives without such a spotted history of lockdown and control issues from management. I know nothing about the fellow. This is not personal.

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