Honestly I think the main reason for this perception is that people in the Elm community have gotten increasingly tired of correcting inaccuracies people like to post about Elm on Hacker News.

I spent a bunch of time doing that in the past, and eventually stopped because I felt like Sisyphus. The same people would crop up on the next thread repeating the same things anyway. Of course if the claims go unchallenged, it leads to the perception that they're accurate...but that doesn't make engaging with them any more enjoyable a way to spend one's free time.

If you want to check the health of the Elm community, visit Elm Slack and ask in the #beginners channel how people feel about it. It takes about the same amount of time as posting a HN comment, but it gives a very different perspective than the one you'd get if your main source of Elm information was Hacker News comments! :)

http://elmlang.herokuapp.com/

After considering the way I phrased this comment above, I want to clarify that I never personally observed or witnessed this kind of behavior myself. My own dealings in the Elm community have been almost entirely positive. I had heard a lot of these criticisms from comments on hacker news or reddit and realize now they mostly resemble hearsay or people like myself repeating what they heard from others resulting in a sort of echo chamber. I apologize for adding to that echo chamber.

Also Mint at https://mint-lang.com, which is heavily inspired by Elm (and better, IMO). The open source aspect is also the opposite of Elm - the community is very friendly, the developers are responsive and positive, and PRs are encouraged.

F# solves many of these problems with it's ability to pull in C# libraries. When looking for a functional language to learn I settled on F# and am loving it so far. I'm not sure if I'd ever use it in production as it is still very niche.

What Evan is doing with Elm is awesome, he has a small closed set of features to make a language that is aimed at doing one thing. He has very tight control to make sure there is zero cruft in the language. It's an amazing project. The cost is that it's very hard for outsiders to have any input into the language. So the ecosystem will never take off.