u/Llamas1115in r/ProgrammingLanguages • Recommends
The Economics of Programming Languages
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#elm#opensourcefunding#compilerengineering
"The Economics of Programming Languages" by Evan Czaplicki (Strange Loop 2023)
Strange Loop Conference
88K subscribers • 114 videos on Hallway • Conference channel
- Recommended by 13 people: 10 on Hacker News, 1 on Lobsters and 2 in engineering communities.
- Presented by Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm
- An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.
Beginner. No background in the topic needed.
141K views3 years ago13 recommendations
Careers and interviewsProgramming languagesThe tech industryOpen sourceLanguage design and type systems
Evan Czaplicki examines how programming languages are funded, where compiler engineers' salaries come from, and how funding models shape language design.
In the mythology of open source, programming languages are created by people who seemingly have no direct economic function. They are just really good at compilers (somehow) and have a house to live in (somehow) and have a lifetime to devote to creating a useful programming language (somehow!) We will examine specific organizations that create programming languages. Where do the salaries for compiler engineers come from? How does Go end up with 5 engineers and Dart end up with 30? Who signs off on these expenses and why? Does this put any boundaries on language design or development practices? And how do the economics work for people outside of the major tech corporations? My goal is to give the talk I needed to hear 10 years ago when I was just starting on Elm. By clearly delineating the many variations of corporate funding and independent funding, I hope users will come away with a better foundation for evaluating and comparing programming languages. Evan Czaplicki Creator of Elm @evancz Evan is the creator and developer of the Elm programming language. He lives in Denmark, working alongside his wife at elm.studio to keep Elm independent and interesting. ---- Recorded Sept 22, 2023 at Strange Loop 2023 in St. Louis, MO. thestrangeloop.comWhy it's here
13 people recommend thisWhat people say. Highly recommended as an eye-opening explanation of how programming language funding works and its impact on open source development.
Moments people linked to
__rito__on Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: Best tech talks you have heard in 2023?”
…etation of Classical Mechanics . He now has a full-fledged project, and touches upon many ideas for educating people through innovative means. Really loved this video. Connected the ideas of Logo programming environment and something like a LISP-Physics visualizer. 1. "The Economics of Programming Languages" by Evan Czaplicki (Strange Loop 2023) - link to this video - How does creating a new programming language work really? Who are the players, and what goes behind? Very highly recommend this funny, informative talk to understand aspects of creating a programming language other than the theoretical ones. 2. Function Composition in Programming Languages - Conor Hoekstra - CppNorth 2023 - link - This…
arcadia_leakon Hacker News • Recommends
On “D Programming Language”
> This talk explain why, it's not technical: link to this video Really good talk, I remember watching it when it came out. Elm is what got me looking into FP several years ago, a nice language it was.
josephgon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Just paying Figma $15/month because nothing else fucking works”
…And I'd much rather be programming than doing all of that other stuff. I think a lot of projects really want fulltime maintainers. But instead they just have the unpaid, overworked authors doing what we can. Of course users want better. But, well, thats how it is at the moment. Honestly, its surprising that everything works as well as it does. 1 link to this video…
surprisetalkon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk from the past year?”
A bunch of great talks at Strange Loop this year! Two off the top of my head: • "An approach to computing and sustainability inspired from permaculture" by Devine Lu Linvega: link • "The Economics of Programming Languages" by Evan Czaplicki (Strange Loop 2023): link to this video I've also been loving TodePond's cellular automata videos. Their SPLASH talk was mind-blowing, but it doesn't look like it's out yet. • TodePond playlist: link
D4ckardon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice”
There's a great talk by Evan Czaplicki 0 that outlines the financial significance of browsers. It helps make sense of why Microsoft (and Apple) act(s) in this way. 0: link to this video
jcuenodon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Learning Elm by porting a medium-sized web frontend from React (2019)”
And for those who are interested, Evan (creator of Elm) gave a great Strange Loop '23 talk that hints at where he imagines things going, if he could figure out how to get the economics to work. link to this video
yawaraminon Hacker News • Recommends
On “DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation”
This reminds me of Evan Czaplicki's great talk where he basically traces the funding of most modern programming languages to search engine revenues :-) link to this video
plankalkylon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: How do you make a living contributing to and/or creating OSS projects?”
…cs work for people outside of the major tech corporations? > My goal is to give the talk I needed to hear 10 years ago when I was just starting on Elm. By clearly delineating the many variations of corporate funding and independent funding, I hope users will come away with a better foundation for evaluating and comparing programming languages. 1 link to this video…
Imustaskforhelpon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Why Nim?”
Oh boy, I always had this knack for seeing/testing multiple langauges and when I had first discovered nim, I used to watch some nim youtube related content and I remember someone in nim community pointed out about this same video from the creator of elm that you also mention. So, I think that I had watched the video and honestly, I will watch it now once again since I don't remember it clearly but If I remember, I really liked it. A quick search points me to the video, though I am not sure link to this video
p0nceon Hacker News • Recommends
On “D Programming Language”
> Are there technical reasons that Rust took off and D didn't? This talk explain why, it's not technical: link to this video > What are some advantages of D over Rust (and vice versa)? Advantages for D: Build faster, in typical programs you would need about 20 packages not 100, COM objects, easy meta-programming, 3 compilers. GC, way better at scripting. Advantages for Rust: borrow-checker is better. rustup.
u/amzamorain r/ProgrammingLanguages • Recommends
"The Economics of Programming Languages" by Evan Czaplicki (Strange Loop 2023)
u/funkiestjin r/Zig • Mentions
On “Why aren’t more people talking about Zig? This language is insanely good!”
I also think this excellent Strange Loop talk: The Economics of Programming Languages does a good job of explaining how hard it is to go from having a good idea to becoming a popular language.
u/maldus512in r/functionalprogramming • Mentions
On “Dive into Elm with "Laugh & Code: The Elm Programming Show" - Episodes 1 & 2 Now Streaming!”
It's honestly hard to say. He lost a lot of traction due to lack of maintenance and online presence from the BDFL, but despite a few hiccups the tool still works.
Bugs and issues (not many and not particularly important, to be fair) are still completely ignored, but a few months ago it was deprecated on Brew because of a security issue with a dependency and it was updated to fix it in a matter of weeks.
The community is not in a good state. Beside the periodical unrest every now and then someone deletes their Elm library (out of frustration or lack of interest), forcing projects that depended on them to go cache fishing for the lost package. You still have some activity but it's mostly fro…
u/funkiestjin r/Zig • Mentions
On “What is the Zig philosophy on APIs and abstraction?”
>... but the way it approaches education in general produces models in me that are very patchy – and no documents, whether in the form of docs or literature, to sew it into a more coherent vision
In one of Kelley's talks he mentions The Economics of Programming Languages. It is worth a listen. The beautiful documentation, blog posts and other stuff that the Go Authors and the Rust folks produce ("dev rel" in industry speak -- *developer relations*) are the result of a big financial investment by the parent corporations.