Gren is a pure functional programmming language that aims to be easy to learn and to reason about, while remaining powerful and portable enough for real-world use.

Today we celebrate a significant milestone for the Gren programming language. Gren is no longer developed by a single developer, but by a core team.

For the past couple of years I've been working on Gren by myself, with help from the small community that has formed around it. This has been a necessity, but it was never the goal. I'm of the belief that software, especially when used by a large and diverse set of users, is best developed in a team with developers of different expertise and experience. There are too many use- and edge cases for a single developer to predict them all.

It's vital that all members of a development team share the same philosophy and understanding of the software they are developing. Otherwise the result will quickly feel like a mish-mash of ideas, as opposed to a cohesive tool.

Finding like minded individuals takes time, but I believe I've found someone who shares my ideas of what Gren should be and has the same drive to see it successful.

Introducing Justin Blake

Justin (A.K.A blaix) has brought welcome attention to Gren through the prettynice and gren-tui frameworks, implemented the HttpServer API in gren-lang/node, greatly improved the language documentation and served as a kind and helpful member on our community chat.

Including Justin in the core team is both a recognition of his contributions to the project, and a way to enable him to do greater things in the future.

What is a core team?

The core team is tasked with ensuring the long-term success of the Gren programming language.

This description is intentionally vague.

While a language requires careful design and active development, it's just as important to have a vibrant community, good tooling, great third-party packages and frameworks. It's the responsibility of the core team to improve Gren in all of these aspects, and more.

The core team also serve as the decision makers for how the language will evolve in the future. That said, major changes to the language will continue to be discussed with the community prior to implementation.

With a core team in place, Gren is more resilient to failure and in a better position to grow. While Justin is the first addition to the team, I doubt he will be the last.