Elm & The Future of Open Source (with Evan Czaplicki)

Evan Czaplicki discusses the history of Elm, language design, and the financial sustainability of open-source software.

Evan Czaplicki—the creator of the Elm programming language —joins me to discuss the state and future of Elm, the friendly, type-safe functional programming language. On many fronts Elm has been a huge success: it’s been popular with new and seasoned programmers alike; it’s helped push several language ideas into the mainstream; it’s been a key part of several successful software businesses and he even found himself employed as a kind of Language Designer in Residence. And yet, the material rewards of a successful open-source project were…lacking. Was he naive? Can an open-source developer stay true to open-source principles and still make a decent living? Is open source being exploited by commercial software businesses? These topics and more tumble out of what has to be the first question in the podcast: What’s happening with Elm? -- Support Developer Voices on Patreon: patreon.com/DeveloperVoices Support Developer Voices on YouTube: youtube.com/@DeveloperVoices/join ElmLang: elm-lang.org/ The Economics Of Programming Languages: youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8 Kris on Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/krisajenkins.bsky.social Kris on Mastodon: mastodon.social/@krisajenkins Kris on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/ -- 0:00 Intro 4:22 What's The State Of Elm? 11:28 What’s Evan Working On? 16:04 What Counts As Success For A Compiler Author? 22:26 Is There A Solution To 'Thankless' Open Source? 27:05 How Can We Share Functional Programming With The Industry? 31:52 DX That's Accessible Without Being Limiting 35:46 So Why Is Rust Gaining Traction? 39:31 Should Design Happen In Public? 41:13 What Made Evan Prioritize Error Messages? 44:50 What Would Evan Do Differently In Hindsight? 46:08 What Advice Would You Give OSS Developers? 48:19 Outro