Elm is also a one-man language, but it enjoyed some popularity. Zig has been a one-man language for some time, but it's got traction, following, and more contributors.

Syntax squiggles are not very important, but other language features, like a good design and removing whole classes of bugs, are.

Zig is a BDFL language, but it's far from a one-man language. There's a Zig Foundation with several full-time paid contributors, with a larger design team who collaborate on the big picture.

If Andrew Kelly were kidnapped by aliens tomorrow, Zig would continue. I think that's the dividing point, when the bus factor is no longer one.

Exactly my point: Zig managed to pass from a one-man-show stage to a more mature, more established stage. Same happened much earlier with PHP and Perl.

Elm, sadly, never achieved that. But I don't see why Borgo would necessarily follow the way of Elm and not of Zig or PHP.

I've had to deal with Elm alone (the original devs had left, leaving next to no docs, because who needs docs with such a beautiful language I guess).

Thankfully I've been able to scramble some syntax highlighting support and reverse engineer how to start and run it, and after a while it actually kind of makes sense.

But I am an engineer, not an artist, and elm code will not survive me in the code base if I can avoid it (unless there are teams of Elm programmers at a place).

Elm might remove classes of bugs, but when there is not a single developer except me who manages to wrestle with it, though luck. TypeScript also removes entire classes of bugs, and it does so while being well documented and easy to understand for devs from other mainstream languages so the other devs won't come running my way everytime they have to fix something written in it.

That it enjoyed some popularity doesn’t mean it was the right choice. Teams who adopted it were, in all likelihood, betting that it would see wider adoption—and if they’d known how Elm (vs, say, TypeScript) ended up by 2024, they probably wouldn’t have gone down that path in the first place.

And now Elm is gone, as its author failed to capitalise on it, to the point of having a talk about lack of funding in FOSS.

Technically not dead, rather stagnant, a difference that hardly matters regarding adoption and ecosystem future.

Along with Elm, another one-man show (per GitHub) of significance is Seed7.