GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech Elm & Open Source: What's Next? • Evan Czaplicki & Kris Jenkins
Oct 24, 2025
Evan Czaplicki, the creator of the Elm programming language, delves into Elm's journey and the complexities of open-source economics. He shares his insights on the challenges of sustainability and the implications of monetization. Czaplicki advocates for type safety across programming stacks and explores the future of functional programming. He reflects on the political dynamics in open source and how they affect creators. Additionally, he discusses why Rust has gained traction and offers advice to new developers in the open-source space.
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Sustainability Beats Open Public Growth
- Evan stopped growing Elm publicly because his professional incentives didn't align with the language's needs.
- He needed a sustainable correlation between investing time and being supported for that work.
Private Prototyping Before Public Release
- Evan began exploring back-end work because Elm users told him their larger pain was on the server.
- He worked privately with companies to demo and validate ideas before any public release.
Type Safety Across The Whole Stack
- Evan wants type safety to flow across the whole stack so changes show consistent errors from DB to frontend.
- He sees compilers analyzing full systems as the path to reduce cross-layer errors.