Yeah Elm has had a very strange arc, but I think calling it a research language is right.

There was a period where it was heavily evangelized. Many blog posts were written and talks given, and there was a lot of enthusiasm and adoption.

Then the author just kind of disappeared and the project stalled.

Which of course he had a right to do since it’s his project, but I think he should have set expectations better from the beginning.

The heavy evangelism helped spread the ideas, but also set up developers to feel blindsided and abandoned.

> Then the author just kind of disappeared and the project stalled.

There was more to the story than that. They made some major breaking changes in v0.19 that broke a lot of apps and left no path for them to continue with Elm, then dug their heels in when the community protested.

If you had an app at your company that used the features they decided not to allow any more, you either had to start deciding which fork to follow or start planning to rewrite your app in something else.

That evangelism turned into an uncomfortable gaslighting where half of the community was trying to tell you that this change was what was best for the language and that you didn’t really need that feature anyway.

There were several forks but I don’t know if any got traction. It felt like an already small community was fracturing into even smaller communities right after alienating a lot of people.