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

[@defusix]

Every introduction to your interviews is a piece of art!

[@UliTroyo]

For sure, Kris is a fantastic host. He provides so much context.

[@MichaelChavinda]

Yeah. New to the channel but that was so good!

[@poparasan]

POLITICALLY MOTIVATED ANALYSIS OF THE OPEN-SOURCE Evan is actually fighting the machine, quietly, but very firm!

[@tqwewe]

huh

[@poparasan]

​@@tqwewe he is problematizing the very practice of "open-sourceing" a piece of software. Each piece of software participates in the movement of capital, and Evan is drawing attention to it to the "apolitical" developers, that are participating in a financial exploitation game. ... And so on ... as Zizek would put it ...

[@aslipperysnake]

I would love for you to expand on that a bit more. Do you mind defining “problematizing”?

[@poparasan]

@@aslipperysnake I wrote the word "problemitizing" elsewhere and remember that I have left you with out an answer. Let me try. Ask you self why we are working as hell for almost no money to make OpenSource project work, only so others can enjoy our work and make money of it? Zizek would tell you that is how ideology works. What Evan is doing here, he is not dismissing open-source aspect, but taking it and telling some facts that chips away from the facade that big Corp have put on to attract free talent and free labour. Problemitizing means that he says - look there is something nice here, but if you look at it, it can appear deceptive and we need to think and work more around it. We need to be aware that open-source in given form is not a solution but a form of exploitation. It's hard not to write paragraphs about it, so hope this helps, if you want, I am happy to develop it further.

[@johannes-vollmer]

A collaboration of you and Evan, we are blessed 🎉 I've always wanted to see you interview him

[@WolfoxBR]

This was great! I'm a big fan of Evan's work and opinions, and you, Kris, are a wonderful interviewer, as always. Thank you both for this!

[@DeveloperVoices]

Awesome, thank you!

[@klirmio21]

One thing they said for sure - Elm's impact on clear and very helpful error messages. I hope all languages were like that.

[@ThreeCheers4me]

Evan's analysis of the of the kind of open source culture where Eric Raymond's writings are the final word full stop is fantastic.

[@KT-dj4iy]

Not sure I understand that. You seem to be saying something like the following: A. There are various kinds of open source software culture B. Eric Raymond's writings are the final word (full stop) on one of those kinds C. Evan's analysis of that particular kind is fantastic Is that right? If so, three questions: 1. What is the kind of OSS culture referred to in B? For example, two major facets of esr's thoughts in this area were laid out in _The Cathedral and the Bazaar,_ and in _Homesteading the Noosphere._ Is that what you are thinking of? 2. Why so emphatic about the finality of esr's position on the subject? 3. What is it about Evan's analysis of that kind of culture that you think is so fantastic, especially given that you seem to feel that esr has already penned the final word on it?

[@striker865]

Go Evan! Love to hear he is still working on Elm, it's such a fantastic language. The error messages, the simplicity, it really is a thing of beauty.

[@kenbollin]

Evan is the man, he has the voice that developers need to hear

[@LewisCowles]

That first 1.5-2 minutes... Such a talented host.

[@OverG88]

This channel is underrated as hell! I've never seen a podcaster to ask such a good questions. Kudos to you sir!

[@DeveloperVoices]

Thanks!

[@inamortz2372]

Great conversation, and delicately handled considering some of the touchier elements. Evan is some character. He's a tale of competing forces-between control and freedom, purity and practicality, innovation and stability-and how one person’s vision navigated (or failed to navigate) them. Can't wait to launch into this with the lads, four pints deep this evening. Will be interesting to hear what non-coders think.

[@mateusfreira]

This is by far the best open-srouce channel content I have seeing in a long time, keep it up the good work💗

[@frozen_tortus]

Hope Even can pull it out again, I learned so much from him and Elm.

[@gxtoast2221]

People complaining in the comments is pretty funny and typical. Evan has been working on the next phase of Elm and he basically said this next update is significant. He mentioned type safety across the stack into the backend and even the database. While Evan has taken a step back to reassess and develop the next phase the Elm community has been innovating around a mature language and a platform.

[@lightlegion_]

Hey! It’s great to meet you!

[@emilaasa]

Great interview Kris, I love your style.

[@DeveloperVoices]

Thank you. 😊

[@Vancha112]

Just seeing this after starting to learn elm this week. Not so sure how good of an idea that is now, but I've already seen other projects using elms architecture because of how well it works. Guess I'll just continue learning it anyway for fun :)

[@majorhumbert676]

While I don't normally program in Elm, I learned a lot from it and use that knowledge every day.

[@AGeekTragedy]

The prophecy has been fulfilled. When the people most needed him, he returned.

[@DeveloperVoices]

😁

[@micro83]

This is an amazing interview. I ❤ what you do thanks so much.

[@hsyl20]

About managing expectations, there is a good lesson in "The rise and fall of high performance Fortran" paper: they released HPF with people expecting too much from it and it was a commercial disaster.

[@wizard_status]

Awesome episode sir.

[@DeveloperVoices]

Thanks!

[@nomoredarts8918]

Omg, you are the only one that pronounced his last name correct. Kudos

[@DeveloperVoices]

Hehe, I made sure he taught me beforehand. 😁

[@JuddMaltin7]

The insights into Eric Raymond's efforts to inject libertarian ideology into software development were spot on. And we've all seen the results of libertarianism in our societies now that economic inequality and the attendant mass suffering are becoming real. It's time to inject a different social economic model into our work.

[@igor28lg]

Thanks

[@DeveloperVoices]

Thanks for the support! ❤️

[@jorgschuster773]

Elm and Roc should come together.

[@stephenpaul7499]

I would love to have tried Elm as I'd never really used a functional thoroughbred before. By the time I became aware of it, politics had apparently ruined the project :( I've heard good things about Elixr but I love my types!!

[@pookiepats]

19:10 - it always surprises me how naive some people can be. I don't mean this as an insult, it's just interesting to me that anybody would make this assumption; even as a young person I would have never made this assumption but I suppose that just speaks to the impact of growing up in x versus y environments.

[@pookiepats]

i wonder how many technologies we would miss out on if this kind of naivety didn't exist.

[@NphiniT]

@@pookiepats I had that naivety before watching this. I always thought Open Source devs were taken care of beyond the donation model. Now I'm wondering why so many brilliant people are naive about this.

[@senkrouf]

people that make that assumption are lefties, ppl that dont make that assumption anymore are not lefties anymore.

[@Qrzychu92]

in dotnet community there was a huge uproar about one pacakge - Moq. (for mocks in unit tests). The author also created multiple packages that are used in pretty much every dotnet project outthere. He added a message that would print "Consider sponsoring me on Github" to the build and pause for 1s once per machine, it would check if your git user is a sponsor. That's it. He got shit on because he shipped a binary with the package, it was scrambled against decompilation etc - not a great move TBH. Just google "Moq controversy". But the majority of voices just said "this is open source, it should be free". Which is messed up. I get that his way of doing that wasn't "correct", but dude, we really should come up with some way to get an itemized "bill" for OS projects, and some foundation would distribute that towards the authors.

[@coder_one]

The conversation was pleasant, but according to me we did not know anything concrete about the future of Elm. All in all, I got the impression that in a very hidden and eloquent way it was conveyed to us that Elm in theory is alive, but in practice - he died.

[@JobvanderZwan]

One way to avoid the three hard parts to writing a programming language is to stick to doing silly esolangs for fun 😉 (of course the price is that it also avoids a lot of other nice things about regular programming languages)

[@evarlast]

So strange to hear this, and the features mentioned at ~15min and compare it to the LLM promoters who say that devs won't be writing software at all in 2-5 years. Huge dichotomy is here.

[@emilvaleev]

Great questions

[@guyblack9729]

Babe wake up, new Evan Czaplicki interview just dropped!

[@fluffyunicorn7155]

I learned from Elm not to invest time in a language that only has one person behind it. It’s fine if there is a company, it’s great if it’s a foundation, but if it’s only one dude - no way.

[@majorhumbert676]

What's the catch, in your opinion?

[@parodoxis]

Funny - I learned the opposite. Elm still works as well as ever and I use it whenever I can.

[@DArsanukaev]

@@parodoxis tomorrow, Evan likely to get hit by a car, and that’ll make him rethink everything, life, priorities, the lot. Maybe he’ll decide that catching waves on some far-off island is way more fulfilling than being glued to comp. Or he'll quarrel with wife after which will go into a steep dive of depression, and lose all drive. Could be he’ll have a kid, and that’ll consume all his time and energy. Maybe he’ll just get fed up with the grind, doing the same thing for years. Hell, he might even pack it all in and head to Tibet, join a monastery to “find himself.” And that’s it. After that, the prog. language’s fate is sealed. Doomed, really

[@thegeniusfool]

Rust is definitely more than a marketing plot. It is in many ways a slimmed down Scala and not burdened - to Kamala it a bit - by too much academics and those heavy JVM ties. I think both Rust and PureSctipt are today better options for almost all tasks than Elmo.

[@parodoxis]

For the tasks for which Elm is designed, no way - Elm is a far nicer experience than using PureScript or Rust (though Rust is totally great for the low-level arena)

[@JLarky]

15:57 we call that drizzle-orm, zod, trpc in typescript world

[@argensardefs6004]

I was very excited for this interview but felt like Evan really didn’t say much of substance and largely avoided the interesting questions . Kris was wonderful as always though

[@pookiepats]

It was a total pity party, dude acts like he invented bottled water

[@parodoxis]

@@pookiepatsExcept, no, he doesn't act like that. He did invent something new, though, that is valuable to a lot of people. In spite of this he's still humble; outside of jealousy I'm not sure how you can justify saying he's acting like that. Why did you watch this video? To pick on Evan or Elm?

[@pookiepats]

@@parodoxis you overuse, commas, it is, hard to read, less is, more. And to your insidious question, I reject the premise as neither of your hateful canned options for me fit the bill. You can spend your days defending people you don’t know, I will spend mine critiquing publicly what is obvious: Even thought he’d end up like Van Rossum or Dahl but he forgot the part where your creation brings something new to market-he only brought a new way of creating something that was already in the market (web applications). When will people get it through their skulls that can’t monetize anything if you’re unwilling to let others be involved in your work aside from throwing money at you. It’s completely ridiculous and naive and he’s butt hurt over this realization.

[@soma_rc]

For my part, the Elm ship has mostly sailed. I can't ignore the fact that the bdfl disappeared for multiple years without notice. That's not how trust is built.

[@kodingamedev]

i mean did Elm cease to be a perfectly usable language in the interim? what part of the FOSS social contract made you think he was obligated to provide notice?

[@JaconSamsta]

@@kodingamedev No one is "obligated" to do anything. I'm not obligated to put in effort to keep in contact with my friends and family, but if I don't I also can't be mad if our relationships drift apart. No, Evan isn't obligated to do anything with Elm that he doesn't want to do, but we also shouldn't be surprised if people question the suitability of a language, if the BDFL just up and disappears. A language isn't a small, one or two file, library that I can just copy paste and fix a bug, if the maintainer isn't reacting to issues or accepting pull requests. And it certainly isn't something that I want to take over the full burden of maintaining. So I need to know that I can, at the very least, work with the maintainers to fix issues as they come up. The view on open source is also extremely negative. Evan was offered a lot of chances to have other people come in and to build a strong core team for Elm. And there are many open source projects (including languages), that operate very successfully around that model and even manage to rotate people out, if they become exhausted with the project. So while I in no way condone attacking Evan directly, it's also fair to acknowledge that there are very good reasons people aren't investing into Elm for their next big project.

[@kodingamedev]

@@JaconSamsta i suppose that's fair But also, literally in this very video, Evan was talking about how he *was* in contact with the companies using Elm for their projects. My actual point being, is that you shouldn't trust *any* FOSS project if you aren't paying the guy. It makes zero sense to even use that type of language when discussing FOSS. Like I understand why people don't trust Elm, but I don't think they should trust any project if they don't have a support contract or something.

[@davidfetter]

For an excited few seconds, I thought this was about the TUI SMTP client.

[@angrymurloc7626]

Have not watched this yet but I have to vent my frustration just at the intro. "has open source always been bad? this person is not getting paid enough for it" is an incredible sentiment that I want to never hear again from anyone in my life. It is open source. Can we maybe not bring weird capitalist production rules into the last space we have left? yes devs need to eat. Thats why theyre usually employed. Wtf

[@angrymurloc7626]

and then 1 minute into the conversation exactly this begins. You know on all the places I've seen Elm discussed there was a sentiment that this is an arrogant person who won't let other people touch his little passion project. I guess they were right. And its a dead language

[@actualwafflesenjoyer]

@@angrymurloc7626 indeed, not like java, the very alive language owned by your capitalist pappy.

[@mrdmajor]

When I witness people in comments call Elm a "failure" because it works real well without using the hypebeast approach, helps me understand why corporations and venture capital chasers have 0 issues raping the web developer community. No wonder why so many have hate for functional logic "1 + 1 = 2 after so many years is lame AF FRFR bruh ngl!" 🤣

[@sbditto85]

It seems like you are assuming that people are saying the syntax and semantics of Elm failed, but really people are saying the leadership (and maybe the community?) have failed. I was using Elm at work and loved it until decisions from leadership really bit us and we realized that it was a mistake to use Elm and migrated away. Our application wasn’t small and it took a significant amount of time to migrate to react, but we lost trust in the elm leadership so it was worth the cost.

[@mrdmajor]

@@sbditto85 Was there any specific performance or bug breaking issues or the migration occurred because the creator doesn't behave like the other framework approaches?

[@sbditto85]

@@mrdmajor there was a list of things, but it’s been long enough I don’t remember them all. The release cycle meant that after releasing 19 if there was anything wrong or you wanted changes you were SOL. Sure some things were fixed, but it was the BDFL that sifted and decided that and it felt like some parts of the community were ignored. One thing we heavily used in our app was web sockets and the 19 release was not friendly to our app because of it. Sure a community package eventually meant you could hack your app to work with ports etc, but after assessing all the issues we had we decided we couldn’t trust the leadership and the fact it technically wasn’t “1.0” meant they could and would just break things (their right) and then it would take _years_ for another release to _maybe_ restore some semblance of the functionality. Had they focused on not removing web sockets until they had an official alternative or allowed a “native code escape hatch” then maybe we’d have stayed but it was clear that was not their priority. FWIW the compiler is awesome and the language syntax and semantics are helpful. We loved the language from that perspective.

[@ProfilProfi]

​@@sbditto85 I have been there. It is now a slow application riddled with bugs. but the management is happy at least, because they are now using what evereybidy else is using. they lost all momentum to move fast.

[@majorhumbert676]

​@@sbditto85 what were the "decisions from leadership" that made you migrate away?

[@babakfp]

Dart is trash. That's why people don't like it. Just take a look at the JS output of Dart, it's insane. If Dart was good, things could be different. I don't think it's fair to blame its failure on other things other than the fact that it was just bad.

[@andreacfromtheapp]

this was too short! :P

[@DeveloperVoices]

True! I could happily have spent another hour on that discussion. 😅

[@andreacfromtheapp]

@DeveloperVoices joke aside, thank you and Evan both for this episode. One that I longed and waited so much. While I understand Evan’s reasons behind not disclosing much, I really hoped for more. That said, Evan is a brilliant person all around and he is not afraid to make great choices or speak out his mind and vision even if largely unpopular. I watched all his videos when falling in love with Elm and lots of what he says there is pure gold. I wish Elm was embraced on a large scale instead of running after the new thing trying to put a patch on what is, simply put, objectively bad design and tech. Is Richard Feldman coming soon? :P

[@DeveloperVoices]

Agreed on all points. Off camera, Evan said there will come a time when he's ready to announce concrete things, and when that comes he'll be back here for round 2. I'm looking forward to it. :-) And Richard? Well him I can deliver immediately: kzbin.info/www/bejne/eqvLeqOohsahbJo

[@andreacfromtheapp]

@@DeveloperVoices looking forward to it! Speaking of Elm success: I listened again the Gleam episode the other day and one thing comes to mind: syntax. They changed syntax (from Elm like) to appeal to a broader audience. Rust also has an imperative style while being largely functional in substance. It is a pity that so many developers “stumble” on syntax and familiarity. I guess we have to look deeper and hope that education will change this in the future. Thanks for sharing Richard episode. It turns out I did watch it already but forgot. Time for rewatching and perhaps round two once Zed hits 1.0!

[@andreacfromtheapp]

@ ps: also, it was the first and only time I heard someone telling it like it is about the early success and embrace of open source by n companies. I’m old enough to have been there as an activist when Microsoft, SCO, and others, were trying to destroy open source and Linux entirely (in any possible way, from IP to weird taxes, and commie scaremongering) to erase that risk to their monopolies and pockets. Not to mention the ODF and open standards battle. Leaving aside further considerations, I wonder if you could make Bruce Perens fit a devvoice to talk about his Post Open efforts. I’m really hoping he can make it happen. I’ve seen so many people criticizing his work “that’s not like open source works” oblivious of whom he actually is. Perens was possibly the only one to say “rms is right and we should go back and stick with free software” not so long after writing the manifesto and the open source initiative started to be poisoned by a plethora of not so open source licenses and companies starting to get predatory with the movement. At the time these were early stages. Today we have the consequences. Of course this is highly philosophical but still. Two real issues we never managed to solve are the economic aspect and the cultural one. So many breathe lots of air without meaning about Copyleft.

[@rayanez]

Unfortunately, I think Elm and whatever his building now are dead projects, specially if it takes him 5 years to deliver anything. And in any case is already a super niche language

[@jacekjacenty]

It's not just a super niche language; it's the best super niche language, and in its niche, it beats the big languages.

[@DArsanukaev]

@@jacekjacenty it might beat the big languages in its niche all it wants. It could dominate any niche, really. But at the end of the day, you still need a certain number of brave souls willing to take the plunge and actually use this prog. language. Only then’ll the more cautious crowd even begin to consider Elm as something viable, something worth their time

[@jacekjacenty]

@@DArsanukaev I was brave, Back in the day of Elm meteoric rise I wrote a complex chart and statistics widget. I can not imagine writing it in JS. While I am cautious about the programing language dogmas I still think Elm or its descendants deserve my attention.

[@adaszko]

Elm is basically a failure story at this point. How is it still hailed as an example to be followed?

[@TankorSmash]

What part it of it failed when you used it?

[@JeffryGonzalezHt]

I think the whole interview was an answer to your question here, did you watch it? Basically "How is something that is so influential, inspiring, and, well, damn near perfect end up this way?" Evan is brilliant, and has provided immense value, and yet in a culture that is predicated on "how can we give that value away for free to.... p0wn the corporate evil ones" somehow (surprise!) didn't work. He now has to hide his work, speak publicly applying great personal discipline not to say too much. I mean the pain under the surface in this fantastic interview was that we have a world where someone like this who has so much to share to help us all has to protect himself is something we all should be ashamed of. The part about having children said it all. Nearly everyone we consider "great" open-source developers are forced to neglect things that are important in their lives - for the benefit of whom? The bigger the company I work at, the more they actually benefit from this free labor, the more they resent those that create it.

[@melaes]

@adaszko I don't think it is hailed as an example to be followed. I think it is an example to "look at" or "learn from". It is unwise to look only at successful projects, you will learn much more from projects that "failed" than from the one that "succeeded". Elm is a very interesting case, because despite how it ended it was excellent programming language and Evan is an outstanding programming language designer. Learning from that "failure story" (as you put it) is incredibly insightful. Also don't forget that "success" and "failure" are fairly subjective values. Personally I think Elm "succeeded" in some sense of the term.

[@corey4448]

So the thumbnail is essentially a clickbait?

[@DeveloperVoices]

I'm not sure what you mean. "What's the future of Elm?" was pretty much the first question I asked Evan, and his answer formed the bulk of the subsequent discussion. Of course, I would have loved it if the answer was, "The next version's out this week! And we'll have v1.0 by March!" But that's not the case, and I think Evan very eloquently explains why that's not the case.

[@corey4448]

@ completely fair, it was pretty sad to see such potential of a language just vanish.