Keynote: Rethinking our Adoption Strategy - Evan Czaplicki | Lambda Days 2025

Evan Czaplicki argues that functional programming communities must revise their adoption strategies to align with the business perspectives of non-technical decision-makers.

✨ This talk was recorded at Lambda Days in June 2025. If you're curious about our upcoming event, check lambdadays.org ✨ Keynote: Rethinking our Adoption Strategy Language decisions are often made by non-technical founders, risk-averse managers, that one contractor who wrote the whole MVP in Ruby, etc. It may be true that languages like Elm, Haskell, and OCaml offer great technical advantages, but that just is not how the decisions are made. I argue that we must revise our adoption strategy to account for the perspective of the non-technical business person: - What is a "Platform Language" and how is it different from a "Productivity Language"? - What are the "business characteristics" of a programming language? How do different languages show up differently on a budget? - How can us non-business people cooperate more effectively to make Productivity Languages more attractive than Platform Languages? I hope that this talk will save other language authors some time, and inspire renewed cooperation between companies that love Productivity Languages. Let's keep in touch! Follow us on: 💥BlueSky: bsky.app/profile/lambdadays.bsky.social 💥LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/lambda-days 💥Facebook: facebook.com/lambdadays 💥Mastodon: genserver.social/codesync 💥Twitter: twitter.com/LambdaDays