Disclaimer: I think both Clojure and Elm are good technologies and I understand most of the trade-offs they've made. I wouldn't mind using either for a project or two in the future.
Some important context for me, when I read this gist, was that Evan Czaplicki had just written a post and done a talk that basically amounted to "People should stop being mean to open source maintainers".
The parallels between Clojure and Elm (which Czaplicki created) are actually a fair few; both are fringe, opinionated languages which brought some exciting new (in some sense of the word) tech to the forefront (FRP for Elm, persistent data structures for Clojure, etc.) and both languages were hosted in an environment that afforded very few niceties when they were created (both creators probably heard "You saved me from X!" a lot).
I think the most important similarity between the two languages is that they both have ended up with communities that feel like cults of personality.
The overwhelming feeling if you come into Elm as an outsider is that everyone literally feels like Evan Czaplicki is absolutely right about everything and everything he says will be taken as universal truth and probably even interpreted much more harshly than he meant it (if what he's saying is a comment on another technology, for example).
In Clojure this cult-like feeling is less obvious in many ways, but shines through in that people will literally just quote Rich Hickey talks as if they were the bible and also expect these quotes (which usually aren't very good arguments in themselves) to actually be considered legitimate arguments. Sometimes this will spill out into the broader community and it becomes obvious how little the followers have thought about the arguments involved, since they now have to substantiate something that in the Clojure community is just considered a given because of shared context and blind acceptance ("We can just regurgitate the quote and it's an argument against something").
I would argue that the problem that Rich Hickey and Evan Czaplicki have are caused by this same isolation in a community that seems to massively overvalue their opinion and reinforce it blindly at every turn. If all you hear is "Yes!" all the time the opinions of people with legitimate gripes are going to seem much more harsh and if you're unlucky some of them might actually turn out more harsh because of the dissonance between how normal people act vs. how people who bought into the cult act.
P.S.: If you're seeing parallels between the Elixir community and the above you're not alone. It's very hard to have discussions in that community without running into the same kinds of believers (usually with very limited real world experience).
Some important context for me, when I read this gist, was that Evan Czaplicki had just written a post and done a talk that basically amounted to "People should stop being mean to open source maintainers".
The parallels between Clojure and Elm (which Czaplicki created) are actually a fair few; both are fringe, opinionated languages which brought some exciting new (in some sense of the word) tech to the forefront (FRP for Elm, persistent data structures for Clojure, etc.) and both languages were hosted in an environment that afforded very few niceties when they were created (both creators probably heard "You saved me from X!" a lot).
I think the most important similarity between the two languages is that they both have ended up with communities that feel like cults of personality.
The overwhelming feeling if you come into Elm as an outsider is that everyone literally feels like Evan Czaplicki is absolutely right about everything and everything he says will be taken as universal truth and probably even interpreted much more harshly than he meant it (if what he's saying is a comment on another technology, for example).
In Clojure this cult-like feeling is less obvious in many ways, but shines through in that people will literally just quote Rich Hickey talks as if they were the bible and also expect these quotes (which usually aren't very good arguments in themselves) to actually be considered legitimate arguments. Sometimes this will spill out into the broader community and it becomes obvious how little the followers have thought about the arguments involved, since they now have to substantiate something that in the Clojure community is just considered a given because of shared context and blind acceptance ("We can just regurgitate the quote and it's an argument against something").
I would argue that the problem that Rich Hickey and Evan Czaplicki have are caused by this same isolation in a community that seems to massively overvalue their opinion and reinforce it blindly at every turn. If all you hear is "Yes!" all the time the opinions of people with legitimate gripes are going to seem much more harsh and if you're unlucky some of them might actually turn out more harsh because of the dissonance between how normal people act vs. how people who bought into the cult act.
P.S.: If you're seeing parallels between the Elixir community and the above you're not alone. It's very hard to have discussions in that community without running into the same kinds of believers (usually with very limited real world experience).