Matching on negative literals results in a parser error. This Github issue is a good example of why I will never touch Elm. Elm is a very interesting functional language but gosh the governance is bad. The bug report is that Elm explodes if you try to use negative numbers in pattern matching, and this is the answer of Elm author:
Why are you doing this? Instead of fake examples, can you explain how this comes up?
D-uh. There was a drama a long time ago that Elm banned using JS directly in third-party libraries (reserving this possibility for stdlib only), and that decision caused many people to leave the language community. I’m surprised anyone even stayed.
I guess the point of this post is that when picking a programming language, not only the language itself matters but also the community and the governance around it.
The Go core team is considering adding telemetry in Go toolchain (compiler, formatter, linter, language server, all that stuff) that is opt-in by default. I wonder how far this story would go, but I think it will be fine. There already were talks that Go is just another Google’s product, they don’t care about community, and generics (the initial proposal based on contracts) are getting pushed. And that story the Go team managed well. They canceled the controversial proposals, and what we now have in Go is much more community-accepted.
I could also rant about the Go community itself (and push-back on generics for years as an idea), but I should stop somewhere.