I also feel like Evan is misrepresenting the implications of business pressure on the language a bit. His fear seems bound to how a “bad” business might manage a language, which is definitely realistic of course. But I’ve personally only been fortunate enough to work for “good” employers, who I think would tackle it differently. For example, if there is business pressure to achieve some goal, then a good business wouldn’t necessarily care about whether something is a feature of the language or not. You just need to be able to explain why the decision to not change the language is still the right move, both short term and long term.
Additionally, if a business were to apply pressure towards getting e.g. web socket support in Elm, then a good business wouldn’t necessarily say “it must be integrated directly in the language”, but could say “we need the tools to be able to create a library for this”. Which is something everyone would benefit from, without bloating the language. Similarly, there might be business pressure to add better protocol buffers support in Elm, but that could also just as easily mean better libraries or better tools (or both).
Heck, there are probably still some business out there who would like to pay just to make sure some some bugs fixed and other maintenance work gets done.
So generally I don’t consider business pressure bad, it just depends on how that pressure is managed. And actually, I think having no pressure at all to make changes is only possible if nobody uses a language or nobody cares about it.