Top all-time · #408
Luke Plant
Personal blog · lukeplant.me.uk/blogprogrammingweb
Luke Plant's personal blog at lukeplant.me.uk covers programming and web. Since 2008, 136 different Hacker News readers have linked it 183 times, most often “Why I’m Leaving Elm”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 6 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
Linked mostly for his critique of Elm, 'Why I'm Leaving Elm', and essays on less powerful languages and Django class-based views. Commenters call the Elm post the best summary of the problem.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- Elm post summed it up best and its issues are valid; good discussion; persuasive; recommended reading.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Why I’m Leaving Elm16 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2020-04-09
- Learning Haskell/Python makes you a worse C# programmer10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2009-11-17
- Breaking "provably correct" Leftpad6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2025-10-04
- Everything Is an X6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-11-11
- Django's class-based views were a mistake6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2012-05-29
- /blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-08-18
- Python Type Hints: case study on Parsy4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-11-21
- The different uses of Python type hints4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-04-05
- Help my website is too small4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-12-19
- We need less powerful languages (2015)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-11-14
What Hacker News says?
some examples https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27808306 https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/ and there's also the elm-pine issue, where an independent package manager was shunned by the core developers (note that the official package manager doesn't support basic features as repos not on Github)
Comment linking /blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/
on “Rust Moderation Team Resigns”Submitted Why I’m Leaving Elm as a story · 732 points
HN discussionThe fact that they so readily call Musk as being "narcissistic" (or "asshole" or "cult leader") reveals the rather dark nature of these "egoless" souls. It is good to evaluate people on their actions rather than what they claim to be. We saw a good example of this in the Elm community[^1]. --- [^1]: From https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/ > The leadership style in Elm is extremely aggressive and…
Comment linking /blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/
on “Egoless Engineering”Submitted Yagni Exceptions (2021) as a story · 290 points
HN discussionHe mentions custom elements here[1]. I don't speak Elm, so I'm not sure if it's what you're referring to. [1] https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/#id14
Comment linking /blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/
on “Why I’m Leaving Elm”Submitted We need less powerful languages as a story · 287 points
HN discussionThe author gives more specifics in the footnotes, specifically footnote #4 https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/#id14
Comment linking /blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/
on “Why I’m Leaving Elm”Submitted Should we use AI and LLMs for Christian apologetics? (2024) as a story · 170 points
HN discussion> I continued reading and found bunch of more passages where the authors understanding of open source seems to be incorrect. The author is one of the "core team" members of Django[0]. So, it is safe to say that whatever assumptions he has about open source is not a fantasy and cannot be compared line-by-line to a text book definition of open source. [0] - https://lukeplant.me.uk/personal.html
Comment linking /personal.html
on “Why I’m Leaving Elm”Submitted Everything Is an X as a story · 109 points
HN discussionHere's the relevant section from the article for this comment. https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/#why-d...
Comment linking /blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/
on “Why I’m Leaving Elm”Submitted Why I'm leaving Elm (2020) as a story · 100 points
HN discussionElm has done some great work, even the ones, who left elm for other tech, acknowledge elm's elegant design. However, elm is not pragmatic. the issues mentioned in Luke plant's "leaving elm" [0] are valid. and Evan's response to that was far from satisfactory[1] and this has affected Elm's popularity. The disagreement between BDFL and community has happened in many other cases as well. and there is a way to solve the…
Comment linking /blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/
on “Maintain It with Zig”Submitted Some quick Django optimisation lessons as a story · 96 points
HN discussionYeah, I can see the similarity. Thanks for the links. Also, vaguely related, and a way to achieve this goal of making things composable, is the "everything is an X" pattern: https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/everything-is-an-x-patter...
Comment linking /blog/posts/everything-is-an-x-pattern/
on “Hans Reiser on ReiserFS deprecation in the Linux kernel”Submitted A Django website that took (a lot) more than 20 minutes. as a story · 91 points
HN discussionAs I have mentioned before on other threads, crypto has no usecase other than to speculate on the token price, scam people and to embolden ransomware in the case with Zcash and other privacy tokens. On top of it all they all are unregulated and fluctuate too much to even act as proper currencies which they are not. Other voices such as Luke [0] explain in vastly more than a HN thread. [0] https://lukeplant.me.uk/blo…
Comment linking /blog/posts/the-technological-case-against-bitcoin-and-blockchain/
on “Arti – An implementation of Tor in Rust”Submitted We need less powerful languages (2015) as a story · 84 points
HN discussionThere is no reason to present a personal attack with your non-argument. As I said before in other threads there are alternative ways they can receive grants for funding of Tor projects without endorsing crypto scams. I mentioned Mozilla and Rust foundation as examples. On the crypto tokens, there are tons of reasons not to use them as I have mentioned on this thread and others have mentioned as well. [0] [0] https:/…
Comment linking /blog/posts/the-technological-case-against-bitcoin-and-blockchain/
on “Arti – An implementation of Tor in Rust”Submitted Breaking "provably correct" Leftpad as a story · 68 points
HN discussionIt simply is. Not just 'ZCash' but the entire space [0]. [0] https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/the-technological-case-ag...
Comment linking /blog/posts/the-technological-case-against-bitcoin-and-blockchain/
on “Arti – An implementation of Tor in Rust”Submitted Test smarter, not harder (2020) as a story · 66 points
HN discussionYea it's too bad. If the core team was more open and/or communicative I'd use Elm for production. Maybe you've already seen this but there is a pretty solid blog post detailing the state of Elm: https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/
Comment linking /blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/
on “Motivation – Keli Language”Submitted Why Learning Haskell/Python Makes You a Worse Programmer as a story · 66 points
HN discussionI have heard otherwise, both in comments here and via https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/#forka... , but it’s entirely possible I’m wrong. Added: This comment is also not terribly friendly. https://github.com/gdotdesign/elm-github-install/issues/62#i...
Comment linking /blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/
on “Elm at Rakuten”Submitted Learning Haskell/Python makes you a worse C# programmer as a story · 60 points
HN discussionI have heard otherwise, both in comments here and via https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/#forka... , but it’s entirely possible I’m wrong. Added: This comment is also not terribly friendly. https://github.com/gdotdesign/elm-github-install/issues/62#i...
Comment linking /blog/posts/why-im-leaving-elm/
on “Elm at Rakuten”Submitted Why learning Haskell/Python makes you a worse programmer (2006) as a story · 59 points
HN discussionThis was posted on hacker news sometime ago, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10567408 -> http://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/less-powerful-languages/ I think it is relevant to this discussion. Having used Puppet before ansible, I tend to agree with it.
Comment linking /blog/posts/less-powerful-languages/
on “Ansible 2.0 released”Submitted The technological case against Bitcoin and blockchain as a story · 57 points
HN discussion
