 Watched the The Economics of Programming Languages talk from StrangeLoop, and I wonder why they don't consider building software projects in the language as a way to fund its development. The division between tooling and product are at the core of the funding issues. I understand the donation model, but from my experience the best way to fund language development is to build things people will be happy to give you money for, and using some of that money to improve the devtools(incl. language). 20 comments
@ffsanton As someone else mentioned in the thread, I think Java was a precursor to language as a platform, where funding was decoupled from the products. I haven't had a chance of learning about the story of java until now, just reading about it atm- @neauoire in the 90s there were lots of companies that made money selling language IDEs (Think, CodeWarrior, VisualAge, Borland, etc) or even just distributions of open source languages (ActiveState). These were often effectively their own languages (eg I used a THINK C that was a non-standard C++ subset). I see Java as the thing that shifted commercial development towards an open/free “platform” and killed tooling as a viable business. Secondarily, the rise of Linux vs commercial UNIX. @neauoire @CodingItWrong I came up when the big debate (in non-scientific software) was whether C could supplant assembly language for serious work. That sort of felt like a platform play, going for market share, though more driven by programmer enthusiasm and organizations eager to avoid vendor lock-in. @neauoire I know Scala used this approach and I'm curious if you know other sucessfull examples @archiloque well, because I had to research this coming from the games angle, I can think of games where programming languages were developed explicitly to achieve the creation of that one game. And the funding from the game sales powered the language. But in web stuff, there's a chasm between people developing the tools and the people make products and money from them. @neauoire ahh thanks, I didn’t though about games. For web and business applications were long time maintenance can be an important thing, paying for a thing to be developed new programming language can be seen as risky @neauoire this sounds similar to the approach the Laravel PHP framework has taken: the language is free, and you can run it on anything, but they build paid services to make your Laravel development easier i guess Rails would be a different approach: it emerged from the underpinnings of a commercial service *not* for developers any particular examples you're thinking of? @CodingItWrong I'm trying to build a collection of examples at the moment(that are not video games). I don't have that many examples in mind no. @neauoire I think this concept of vertical integration has very much fallen out of favour. I’ll also say that often language designers are not good at “product”. So the question becomes around gathering a diverse set of folks with cross-disciplinary skills. I keep thinking about Cross License Collaboratives as a model here https://xlcollaborative.com/introduction @boris I'm not sure I understand how cross license works > Rather than assigning or licensing their contributions to a centralized organization, contributors license each other. Is there a pool? or do collaborators split their licensing fee individually between collaborators? @neauoire for licensing revenue there is a pool. How this is structured isn’t detailed, just described. “Cross license collaborative governance rules also require sharing of any proceeds related to licensing. If the collaborative makes its project available under a share-alike or noncommercial licensing, and then chooses to sell an exception for closed or commercial use, they must share the license fee with all contributors.”  @neauoire this sounds like the consulting stream Evan mentions, where Cognitect and Clojure fit. Nubank ultimately reimbursed Rich Hickey by acquiring Cognitect, in turn topping up the retirement fund he drained to get Clojure up and running. @neauoire This was a great talk, and I wanted to know more about the way Czaplicki evaluated and categorized the different funding models too. What you propose sounds like it might fit into the "Consulting" category as he described it, maybe? Just based on what I *vaguely* know of Cognitect and how they operated, essentially using Clojure in their client projects as a way to fund the lang, while also using Datomic, too, and getting paid for hosting. H/e, don't take my word on any of that! 🙃   @neauoire C happened because Unix was built in it. It was not load bearing before, and attempts to replace it have yet to displace it becuase nobody's dogfooded a whole OS (kernel and all) in any other language yet. I refuse to care about Rust/Go/Swift until a usable OS exists written in one that can rebuild itself under itself without needing any other language to complete that basic circle. It's not a load-bearing systems language otherwise, just a parasitic growth on the C ecology.  @neauoire I also watched it. The message seems to be that a language can't succeed without money, because as soon as it starts to catch on, a single hobbyist can't manage it anymore, so you need paid help. That is probably correct to some extent today, although I can cite some counter-examples. |
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I sort of wonder, have programming languages always been "platforms" hungry for market capture, or is that a relatively new thing.