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:
But then you see stuff like this https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/
The author is very charitable in their description of the Elm Core teams actions in these interactions, but you read it and they come off entirely unaccountable and dismissive. If they want to make a purely functional language locked down, you really should be upfront that they don't have time to make sure basic parts of the web ecosystem are arbitrarily locked off like i18n until they decide users of their langauge are permitted to use it after ruling out any suggestion it doesn't undermine the purity they were going for.
https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/bindings-for-intl/1264
Gonna be honest, really got the impression the maintainer here couldn't be stuffed looking to it, and wasn't personally impacted and largely didn't give a shit. Proceeds to run off some bullshit to dismiss the issue entirely about it being too risky (he had better things to do, and anyone he can delegate this too does too), the poster offers to do the work write a report, etc, etc. Then he's ghosted and for some reason the thread is shut after 10 days lol??? I guess giving him the dignity of a reply is out of the core teams hands because of how they arbitrarily configured their discourse.
Don't blame that dude for leaving Elm, glad I never made the mistake of wasting my time being dependent on its infantilizating runtime.
Look if you want to avoid being too coupled to the runtime your language exists in, sounds like a cool experiment, but maybe don't drag everyone along with you until you figure out the basic issues.
All that is 6 years ago hopefully they're more self aware.
I love Elm, and I love the community, but I feel a little gaslit here.
There was some drama when someone forked it so you could write your own JavaScript wrappers/FFI too?
it taught me a lot of things - such as simplicity. when I ended up switching to react - redux was easy to pick up cz of elm.
sadly the ecosystem never grew. but oh man elm is nice & the apps were performant.
Your argument is a mirror of the snark question "why don't LLMs write in assembly?" for those not looking at the output at all.
With all due respect, not everyone is afflicted with the lack of care sufficient to allow them to launch vibe coded apps as low quality as https://podnami.com. Considered technology choices are one such aspect of the practice of caring about what you're building.
The biggest thing for me from practical perspective was to "freeze" some pieces of DOM to be guaranteed to not change/re-created, so that it plays well with some external JS libraries expecting some nodes to not change and stay vanilla.
Another is ability to extend Elm's debugger to filter out big noisy data to keep it usable for our project.
Third is when your data is too big -- it just sometimes fails with "recursion limit" that's hard to debug due to the nature of the langauge.
Otherwise – it's a very beautiful little language that still feels quite modern and easy to work with IMO.
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!
I never used elm except for doing a tutorial, but lately I've built a full stack gleam app (using coding agents for the most part, with a lot of control in the beginning on the structure of the code) and have found that process works quite well
In my eyes, it was probably the right decision technically, but deeply unpopular and probably the wrong decision socially.
So it was dead, it just now has been resurrected (and AFAIK with a whithered community in the meantime).
javascriptland really warps peoples minds on stability and project-liveness
However, I feel people often miss the real value of a good DSL: it's not about the syntax, but about providing hardened semantics that can bolster or guarantee desired qualities. Elm, for instance, provides value insofar as it makes producing runtime exceptions significantly more difficult.
Personally, I hope languages like Lean, which provides exceptional support for creating DSLs within the language, renew interest in semantically sound DSLs, especially if we insist on using LLMs.
It’s a whole different set of values. Good React code in 2026 looks like any compiling Elm code since 2016.
Then the 0.18 to 0.19 Elm drama happened: The core team restricted the ability for users to do any native JavaScript interop, which broke every Elm app that needed any functionality that wasn’t in the core library.
It split the Elm fans into two groups: Those who were upset that they had invested in a language that now pulled the rug out from under them, and those who were true believers who told us that they trusted the Elm team’s decisions and we all needed to chill out and wait for them to address our needs, which they thought would happen soon. That was 7 years ago. There were some attempts to spin the lack of updates as “Look how mature and stable it is!” but you don’t have to look very deep to see that they just stopped working on it.
Last time I went back to look at it there were several Elm forks, some maintained by former members of the Elm core team that were more active but never caught on. With the way the core team broke important functionality, ignored the user base, and then abandoned the project for years there is no way I would ever allow this near a production website. I know that will earn me some downvotes from the die-hard Elm fans, but I think it’s important context for anyone who finds themself in a situation where Elm is being proposed for an internal project. It was always interesting as an experimental niche framework, but not as something I’d ever want near a product that I had to maintain. Especially not something that had to survive across developer turnover when your company’s main Elm proponent left and the language was abandoned for years.
Also, if you ever had to refactor anything, there is no language in the world that makes it as easy to change things.
Hope to see more releases in the future.
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.
Yes but no? It really just depends on the amount of elm in the training data and rlhf. I agree that structured frameworks/languages have codebases more similar to one another and that would ease generation. But that alone won't work and usually dev adoption is a total discourse per se
If Elm's definition of stability is keeping bugs and runtime errors for years, then I'm glad I stopped using Elm long ago.
Not only were the issues unaddressed, but for the past years the PR got no human response. For instance this one¹ fixes infinite loops in the core. [¹]: https://github.com/elm/core/pull/1137
I think the "Elm is stable not dead" seen from the few people that stuck around with Elm is largely cope for being stuck with an unmaintained language. Languages, like all other pieces of software need maintenance or they degrade in the world moving around it (e.g. there is/was no official aarch64 build of Elm in the period of non-maintenance).
I also would say that Elm is still largely unfit for most realistic production scenarios, unless you have the manpower to build everything from scratch, as interoperability with the outside web world (JS/TS) is an afterthough, and by some parts of the community not desired.
LLMs are surprisingly effective at helping you learn the "vibes" of making music and understanding various concepts.
The Elm community (or those who remained anyway) has a very cult-like way of spinning the current status quo as being good for you, even if it’s not.
Removing native JavaScript interop in 0.19? They’re just making it more pure! Sorry your project had to become impossible to continue on Elm, but this is the price we pay for a leader with vision.
No appreciable updates or bug fixes for 7 years? That’s just stability! Look how stable and mature it is that it can go 7 years without a release!
[0]: https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/native-code-in-0-19/826
Elm's current story for interacting with the wider web ecosystem is "reinvent the wheel a dozen times by DIYing your own wrappers around literally everything". Fine for a trivial toy project, not fine for building production software.
I understand why they made those decisions, and each choice on its own is logical, but that doesn't make the combined outcome any better.
I noticed that coding agents seemed to get pretty good around 2025 Oct/Nov.
If it's improved? My experience with Nickel-lang (probably as not-in-training-data as Elm) is coding agents have improved with this compared to last time I tried.
I get that some people like stability, but that is quite different from going without updates for 6+ years.
It sounds like evaporative cooling.
https://lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative-co...
Though with the advent of LLMs it became very easy to spin up alternate backends for it, so it's very much alive outside of JS as well.
Today's Elm toolchain is the Elm toolchain of 6 years ago!
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.
If not, the expectations you and many have here seem pretty unreasonable. There's room for projects like Elm. Not every PL has to meet the demands of every single non paying user of the community.
To be fair, Elm hasn't made it to 1.0 (yet). That's where languages should make breaking changes before being stuck with the flaws forever.
You can still indirectly call native JavaScript, in a message-passing kind of way (via Ports or custom elements) but these changes were still really disruptive to many codebases.
This "nobody is allowed to do this until Evan himself has made time to come up with a blessed solution" style of development left a lot of people quite disappointed. Elm was marketed quite heavily as the best thing since sliced bread and the future of front-end web development, but in reality it turned out to be just Evan's toy language which you could look at but weren't allowed to touch. Which is of course allowed, but it does rapidly kill any kind of community around it.
https://discourse.elm-lang.org/t/native-code-in-0-19/826
Personally, I was sad to see signals and FRP go in 0.17
Synchronous interop was removed from Elm. That sucks for synchronous stuff and anything too trivial to be worth async interop.
But async interop is still available. Anything networked, like websockets, is a natural fit for async interop. i.e. a Send(Req) | Recv(Res) port.
It's fine to be mad that a "BDFL" decided on a different set of trade-offs than your preference, but that's what happened.
It's also a learning lesson for people who thought that a tiny, pre-v1.0 ecosystem that already had breaking changes would never break again especially in a way they disagree with. I think it's time to just accept the lesson.