Kris Jenkins interviews the creator of the Elm programming language, Evan Czaplicki. Evan has been quite elusive in public since 2019 when Elm was put into stasis with the 0.19.1 release. So it’s interesting to hear a little more about what he’s been working on and some of the deep thinking he’s done around the sustainability of open-source and programming languages.
I am clearly biased but one bit that missed the mark for me was when Kris asked the following:
Okay, so I want to come at that from another angle as well because there is definitely a sense that more immediately accessible languages get success in disseminating ideas. But I also, it makes me think of another language which doesn’t have immediately accessible ideas and yet is being very successful and it’s Rust. Hmm. Right? What’s your, not what’s your take on Rust, what’s your take on why Rust is succeeding in mindshare?
Evan’s answer seemed to boil down to: Rust is succeeding because it had funding from Mozilla and that Mozilla was a trusted entity. Perhaps that helped get it off the ground, but the project has been independent of Mozilla since the 1.0 release in 2015 and since then has seen adoption from large organisations like AWS, Google, and Microsoft—clearly they see value in it outside its association with Mozilla. Mozilla’s contributions also dramatically decreased in 2020 when Mozilla laid off many of the folks that it was paying to contribute to Rust.
Aside from that, the interview is interesting and insightful. I fear that Elm may have lost the bulk of the momentum it had in the 5 years since the last release, so I’m not sure how Evan’s server-side solution will fare if/when it is released. However, I am hoping it achieves enough success to be sustainable for him.