<story><title>Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages</title><url>https://blog.realkinetic.com/elm-changed-my-mind-about-unpopular-languages-190a23f4a834</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mooreds</author><text>My question is, how will he feel about this three years from now? When he is trying to hire someone? Or when the folks behind Elm don&amp;#x27;t update it as often as they should?&lt;p&gt;The problem with unpopular languages is twofold:&lt;p&gt;* lack of talent that can step right in and be effective&lt;p&gt;* lack of resources to push the language forward&lt;p&gt;The first can be remediated by planning to bring new hires up to speed, and just making that investment in them. (It can also be a useful filter, making sure you are hiring someone who is really interested to the company and is willing to make the time investment to learn what is probaly not a very portable skill.)&lt;p&gt;The second is a bigger problem, if the main sponsor of the language moves on. If the main sponsor is committed, then you&amp;#x27;re probably fine. (I have no idea who pushes Elm forward, looks like there&amp;#x27;s a foundation from the wikipedia page.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rtfeldman</author><text>Worth noting that in our experience, hiring has gotten &lt;i&gt;way&lt;/i&gt; easier for us since we became an Elm shop. We really struggled to hire React engineers (who have a zillion positions to choose among - why would they pick ours?), whereas there seem to be a lot more great programmers who want to use Elm than there are companies hiring for Elm positions.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s a verbatim quote from a cover letter (one I happened to be reading this morning; we see a lot of similar stories):&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Despite my valiant evangelizing of Elm, my company has decided to embrace React over Elm, so I am looking for opportunities to develop Elm professionally.&lt;p&gt;Our Head of Talent said she&amp;#x27;d never seen an inbound pipeline as strong as ours, and the #1 reason people cite for wanting to apply is Elm. The &amp;quot;Python Paradox&amp;quot;[0] is real!&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&amp;#x2F;pypar.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&amp;#x2F;pypar.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Elm changed my mind about unpopular languages</title><url>https://blog.realkinetic.com/elm-changed-my-mind-about-unpopular-languages-190a23f4a834</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mooreds</author><text>My question is, how will he feel about this three years from now? When he is trying to hire someone? Or when the folks behind Elm don&amp;#x27;t update it as often as they should?&lt;p&gt;The problem with unpopular languages is twofold:&lt;p&gt;* lack of talent that can step right in and be effective&lt;p&gt;* lack of resources to push the language forward&lt;p&gt;The first can be remediated by planning to bring new hires up to speed, and just making that investment in them. (It can also be a useful filter, making sure you are hiring someone who is really interested to the company and is willing to make the time investment to learn what is probaly not a very portable skill.)&lt;p&gt;The second is a bigger problem, if the main sponsor of the language moves on. If the main sponsor is committed, then you&amp;#x27;re probably fine. (I have no idea who pushes Elm forward, looks like there&amp;#x27;s a foundation from the wikipedia page.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>robertkluin</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a partner at Real Kinetic.&lt;p&gt;At Real Kinetic we&amp;#x27;ve actually been internally using Elm for 2 years. While at Workiva, I OKed some internal projects to use Elm as well. Your observations are absolutely correct.&lt;p&gt;We have actually found on-boarding engineers to Elm is fast and relatively easy. There is a very predictable learning curve engineers seem to follow. That&amp;#x27;s one of the things we like about Elm versus some other solutions. The even bigger observation I&amp;#x27;ve made is that all of the engineers we&amp;#x27;ve exposed have become fans, like Alex.&lt;p&gt;The lack of resources and other companies contributing to the community and libraries is a challenge, and a concern. As an example, we use Elm Native UI for some projects. It has a limited user-base, which has at times been frustrating. We&amp;#x27;re hoping to see more adoption of Elm to help mitigate this problem.</text></comment>