SAN FRANCISCO, CA — (Marketwired) — 06/28/13 — , the zooming presentation tool, announces the hiring of Evan Czaplicki as part of an open source initiative to develop Elm, a new computer programming language, with the potential to drastically simplify front-end programming for the web.
“Traditionally, programming languages have been supported and marketed by the huge companies in tech; Bell Labs created C, Sun created Java, and currently Google is working on and ,” says Prezi-s CTO and Co-founder Peter Halacsy. “Now it has become easier for languages like Python and Ruby to succeed without a lot of money because open source creates a strong network when people are excited about an idea and can collaborate. We think Elm can contribute to open-source collaboration too.”
Elm was born out of Czaplicki-s senior thesis at Harvard where he was attempting to solve the problem of building complex applications in JavaScript. He aimed to do this by developing Elm — an open source, statically-typed, functional-reactive programming language that compiles down to JavaScript and runs in a browser.
Evan joined Google-s Gmail team in 2012 but continued working on Elm in his spare time and fostering an active community of developers to broaden the language. In February, Prezi invited Czaplicki to about Elm at , a developer conference in Europe. At this conference Prezi approached Evan to join their team and work on Elm full-time as an open source initiative.
“Elm aims to make front-end programming less complex. The wtf/minute in a given JavaScript codebase can be pretty high, and I want to prove that we can do better by using the past 30 years of programming language research to create a language that makes it easier to get stuff done,” said Czaplicki. “What attracted me to Prezi is that they are open to investing in a long-term solution rather than hoping that someone gets this whole JavaScript thing sorted out.”
Prezi is a presentation software that uses a single canvas instead of traditional slides. More than 24 million people from over 190 countries use Prezi to deliver visually dynamic presentations from the desktop, browser, iPad or iPhone. Founded in 2009, and with offices in San Francisco and Budapest, Prezi provides a multi-platform solution for anyone who needs to deliver a “wow” experience or simply share an idea anytime, anywhere. Whether it-s one person creating a presentation or a team collaborating on an idea, making a prezi is enjoyable from creation to delivery.
For more about Prezi, see . For information about open positions with Prezi please visit .
Kelly Hook
Prezi PR Evanglist
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