[iamwil]

I think Evan's pointing at something, and everyone's looking at the finger. I don't think this is really about Elm at all, but the preparation for Acadia.

In his talk, Economics of Programming Languages https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8, he does reveal a peek at what he's been working on for the past seven years: a query language with functional ideas applied to them.

He points at the boundaries in web apps that typically destroys type information: - language <-> storage - storage <-> wire

What if we could preserve the type information across these boundaries? What would that buy us? One answer he had was easier migrations. They'd just be a type diff, rather than hand-written SQL.

So I think the right question is, can we infer what Acadia is going to be like given the changes he's shipping with Elm? What does incremental compilation give query languages?

[crote]

> I don't think this is really about Elm at all, but the preparation for Arcadia.

Considering Elm's history, why should anyone trust that Arcadia won't work out the same?

No matter how good his ideas are, if Arcadia doesn't have a more future-proof community-focused development model nobody will adopt it. At best it'll end up being "the project that inspired XYZ".

Evan might think it is about the Next Big Thing, and he might even be right, but after Elm will the world care enough to listen?