> That's standard startup speak, though. That's exactly the problem: building a programming language doesn't fit - I think - into the startup framework unless

> That's standard startup speak, though. That's exactly the problem: building a programming language doesn't fit - I think - into the startup framework unless you're prepared to be in stealth-mode for a decade. Even the biggest tech companies have problems with making their languages mainstream - for every success-story like Go or Swift we have some kind of Dart or Dylan that simply didn't work out, despite companies investing massive resources into them. > How else are you going to get investors and early adopters excited? With a programming language? It's easy: have a good, battle-tested codebase which implements your killer features efficiently and correctly, supports non-primary features just as well, and has a huge collection of written (open source) software/examples in that language. That's why I think PLs are not easy (or maybe even impossible) to make into a startup. LightTable had a much higher chance to work out, IMHO, because it was well-defined, was not without precedent and some other similar projects proved to be viable businesses (for a time). EDIT: I forgot, the Red[1] lang team tries to do something similar, ie. write a language and be a profitable company at the same time; we'll see if they manage, but then again, they are looking to "just" displace REBOL instead of "revolutionalizing the way you think about programming" (again). [1] http://www.red-lang.org http://www.red-lang.org