If the consensus is "bad": I imagine at some point elm made the decision to make things highly modular (something which people usually like) and lazy (another thing people generally like), so why are those things a problem in this case?
Update: Mostly what I'm observing here is that the tweet basically implies that the author(s) of elm should be ashamed of themselves for designing (free) software that is so obviously wrong. Publicly shaming projects like this is dumb. I'm not convinced it's ever accomplished anything other than kicking off big flame wars. He should open or contribute to an issue ticket for the elm project. Otherwise, he should just stop using the software if he doesn't like it.
I mean, it is a bit amusing to get an HTTP error as a result of asking a local interpreter to perform addition.
I'd say it's not unusual for modern languages, particularly those integrating package managers, to lazyily download libraries and/or check for updates on the first run of a REPL. But it is a bit odd or unexpected that elm's REPL requires a network connection for every launch and doesn't fall back to a cached copy of the core library packages from a previous run when the connection fails.
You can call it highly modular. Or you call it functionless. IMHO isn't that in any balance.
"Oh, you're only downloading the software you need, when you need it, from the network? That's smart, you must be really smart to fit all these pixels into 640k"
"Who cares if everyone will need the 'core'. Back in the 80ies the rule is: if you can avoid a goto, doso!"
It's not like dumb thin clients and mainframes would be a new thing.
And if you have no internet connection or the package server is down, the REPL will not evaluate any expressions at all, it just shows an HTTP error message on every input (after a timeout).
The only option for offline usage seems to be running the REPL inside a configured elm project directory which has had the core packages downloaded/installed: https://github.com/elm-lang/elm-repl/issues/54
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12718224 (4 days ago) - Elm in Production for France TV
http://elm-lang.org - "A delightful language for reliable webapps. Generate JavaScript with great performance and no runtime exceptions."
