"The Economics of Programming Languages" by Evan Czaplicki (Strange Loop 2023)
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended repeatedly as a funny, informative talk on the economics behind programming languages and open source.
What it is
Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, examines how programming languages are funded. He looks at where compiler engineers' salaries come from, why Go has about 5 engineers while Dart has about 30, and how this limits language design.
Recommended by 10 HN commenters across 8 different months, 2023 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec __rito__ · 2023-12 · on “Ask HN: Best tech talks you have heard in 2023?”
For me, my favorites were: 0. "Computational Physics, Beyond the Glass" by Sam Ritchie (Strange Loop 2023) - [LINK] - This guy created an interactive Lisp-based Physics visualizer and got started on it by reading Structure and Interpretation 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) - [this video] - How does creating a new programming language work really? Who are the players, and what goes behind? Very
Strong rec arcadia_leak · 2026-02 · on “D Programming Language”
> This talk explain why, it's not technical: [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.
Recommends josephg · 2023-10 · on “Just paying Figma $15/month because nothing else fucking works”
> if you don't care about the feature ... all you're left with is a broken window. Maybe. Or maybe I'm left with a building that works fine for me. It might be lacking some features that some people want, but maybe thats ok. > Maybe the onboarding is the real issue. ... the maintainers are too busy to do that themselves most of the time. Yeah; I saw a great talk from Strange Loop the other day by the developer of Elm on the economics of opensource software[1]. He pointed out that a "good" opensource project really wants good dev work, a maintained issue tracker, infrastructure (CICD, etc), a good website, documentation, blog posts, onboarding of devs, community stuff, conference talks, trade
Recommends surprisetalk · 2023-11 · 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): [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]
Recommends D4ckard · 2024-02 · 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]: [this video]
Recommends jcuenod · 2024-02 · 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. [this video]
Recommends yawaramin · 2024-12 · 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 :-) [this video]
Recommends plankalkyl · 2025-04 · on “Ask HN: How do you make a living contributing to and/or creating OSS projects?”
I am not an OSS contributor, so I have no personal experience whatsoever in this context. But I saw this talk by Evan Czaplicki (author of Elm) a while ago.[1] The talk is primarily about the economics of open-source programming languages, but I think that a lot of the issues discussed overlap with other areas of OSS. From the description of the youtube video: > 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