21 ms·

Why aren't there more programming-language startups?

106 points by mpweiher 5y ago

PaulHoule 5y ago
I have been thinking about the topic for a while and the article seems a bit wrongheaded to me. (e.g. you just can't save time by deliberately making tools that aren't 100% correct as much as everyone wishes they could.) For instance, "parser generators" like yacc, bison and all the rest are absolutely awful. One feature they miss is that you should be able to make a small revision to a grammar with a small code patch. (Say you want to add an "unless(x)" statement to Java that is equivalent to if(!x)" - ought to be 50 lines of code not counting the POM file.) I think a better parser generator could open up "compiler programming" and "meta programming" to a wider audience and get LISP fanatics into the 21st century, but it never happens. Anybody who understands the problem enough to solve the problem will settle for a half-baked answer; the labor input to go from "the author can use it" to "revolutionary new parser generator" is a factor of 10x and there is some risk that people still won't get it. Programming the AVR-8 Arduino it's hard to miss the conclusion that "C sucks" but anything really better (say Supercharged Pascal or a Miracle Macro Assembler) would take a huge amount of fit and finish work to make it something that would really beat C. For pedagogical purposes you can argue that C rots the mind like BASIC but you can't argue that learning C is a waste of time. To make a profitable business out of any of the above seems almost impossible.
- cellularmitosis 5y ago
  The high barrier to entry for creating dev tools is truly a shame, and something I think about a lot.
  - TuringTest 5y ago
    The mental model distance between dev tools and user tools is simply too large. Dev tools are still too anchored in the 50's model of source-code >> compilation >> runtime code, when consumer products have a much more healthy mixture of active content and tool palletes working on the content. Heck, even the guy in the article asks about "Programming Languages Startups" when he means "Integrated development startups". This difference is shrinking in the web, both client (DevTools run like an app inside the browser, with live changes to the code reflected instantly in the page) and the cloud (the entry point interface is a collection of collections, where you can inspect and operate on any component running in the system, and even create some kinds of workflows in the live environment). But the lowest level for designing components relies on specifying a fully formed program in formal code, and having to run a build-deploy-test cycle without errors before seeing whether it works, instead of having code and data run side by side to see how the code behaves. I put my hopes in online notebooks, but these are used mainly for data analysis, and "true developers" seem determined to ignore them.
    - PaulHoule 5y ago
      The gap from an "online notebook" to "here's the script to run the monthly report" or "here's the model complete with training and inference that anybody can retrain" is wide. Yet it's the difference between a data scientist making an occasional report to putting their expertise on wheels that makes it worth paying for.
      - TuringTest 5y ago
        Notebooks don't need to be online. You can run a local notebook same way as you run a local IDE. The most significant difference is that the notebook always has runtime information about how the available information is being processed, while the IDE only has this information available while it's in debug mode. The first model provides much more information about the system behaviour, easier to access.
    - JohnFen 5y ago
      > I put my hopes in online notebooks, but these are used mainly for data analysis, and "true developers" seem determined to ignore them. This is merely my own personal preference, not an assertion that my stance is correct or common. For development, it's important to me that I can put the toolchain into version control along with the code. This ensures that I can check out a build that is years old and be able to build it without issue. SaaS solutions break this for me, so I avoid them to the greatest extent that I can. If it's cloudy, then it can change without warning or recourse. That's a problem. For that reason, I would never seriously entertain using something like a netbook for development.
      - TuringTest 5y ago
        You can use toolchains with notebook software, provided a) the notebook has an internal text representation that can be version-controlled, and b) the notebook follows a spreadsheet-loke paradigm with incremental non-mutable data structures, so that all state is represented consistently at all times (no dependence on what order you've run the cells in the current session).
- brundolf 5y ago
  I had the idea a while back to do a parser-generator in the form of Rust macros, which would mean a) you don't have to source-control a giant pile of generated files, and b) you get real-time editor integration without a separate "generate" step. I got out of my depth trying to get the actual macros to process the BNF (it gets very meta because Rust's declarative macros are themselves written in a very BNF-like syntax), but I still think this would be possible and pretty cool
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  I don't think parsing is the hard part of designing a compiler any more
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    It's not the hard part of "designing a compiler" but who wants to "design a compiler?" In ordinary software people spend most of their time modifying existing code. I wouldn't want to reinvent "javac" or "cpython" but adding a new feature to a compiler like that should be easy. Alternately there are a number of "compiler-technology based tools" that we don't have. Instead we get problems like https://www.liquibase.org/ https://www.liquibase.org/ which defines a whole new XML-based language to manage database changes. That's like jumping from the frying pan to the fire since you're still going to have to understand your RDBMS, how to write SQL for it, what the non-standard features are in your database, etc. A sane tool like that would use an extensible parser generator to easily support the variant syntaxes of different SQL dialects and would be able to parse and unparse SQL or a variant of SQL to define change sets. (speaking of which... shouldn't a compiler generator automatically make something that can reverse the AST back to source code? how about round-tripping source code comments, formatting and all like some CASE tools did in the 1990s?) A while back I had the problem that arangodb scrambled the order of columns in JSON result sets and wrote something that parsed the AQL, figured out what the order of the columns was, and turned the result sets into nice pandas frames. If "writing compilers" was easier people would write "compilers" that do things other than compiling to machine code.
    - phillipcarter 5y ago
      > but who wants to "design a compiler?" Lots of people, actually! Just in recent years, Golang, TypeScript, and Rust have shown there's plenty of demand for new languages (compilers!) as developers and their requirements keep evolving. Given how expensive and time-consuming languages are to build and evolve, I'm honestly flabbergasted that we've seen 3+ languages come of age in the past decade and break into the mainstream.
      - nottorp 5y ago
- blippage 5y ago
  > Programming the AVR-8 Arduino it's hard to miss the conclusion that "C sucks" but anything really better (say Supercharged Pascal or a Miracle Macro Assembler) I did see an Ada compiler for the AVR recently (I'm not an Ada programmer). It seemed unpolished, and not really an advancement on C. I think one problem with embedded work is that you either stick to the low-level, in which case you have no advantage over C, or you go for high-level, in which case you have convenience but lose flexibility. In terms of meta programming, Val Schorre has an interesting idea with META-II. Both Alan Kay and Joe Armstrong spoke highly of it.The compiler has its own assembly language. I had this goofy idea of writing a Basic-like language that replaced the assembly. So you'd have a language that was both high-level Basic and a compiler. It would embrace the GOTO, because META-II also generates GOTOs, and GOTOs are a natural fit for CPS (Continuation Passing Style) used by many compilers.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    Personally I find bit-twiddling in C to be painful compared to bit twiddling in assembly. For my Arduino projects in particular I never make recursive function calls, and would be happy to statically allocate everything in RAM. The stack-oriented activation records in C, calling conventions, return values, are more a problem than a solution.
    - calebh 5y ago
      For call graphs without cycles it should be possible to run static analysis to determine the maximum amount of memory taken by your program at any point, assuming you don't use things like malloc or alloca or dynamically sized arrays.
- s17n 5y ago
  "you just can't save time by deliberately making tools that aren't 100% correct as much as everyone wishes they could." The point was about application development - you can save time by making applications that aren't 100% correct. In most software, any bug is OK as long as it happens a small enough percentage of the time.
- drannex 5y ago
  > but anything really better (say Supercharged Pascal or a Miracle Macro Assembler) would take a huge amount of fit and finish work to make it something that would really beat C. Zig is trying to work in this space, and they seem to be getting rather close to the ideal.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > For pedagogical purposes you can argue that C rots the mind like BASIC but you can't argue that learning C is a waste of time. That's a strong statement. C's biggest flaw is that it lies about the underlying memory, but it's a small language that's especially suited to be easy to port.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    If you are exposed to too much C you can't see the C-thulhu. Undefined behavior is normal. The whole relationship between .h and .c files is sick. How you use the "extern" keyword is arbitrary. strcpy is Turing complete. It took a while for people to realize templates are Turing omplete. I'm not sure where the grammar fits in the Chomksy Hierarchy since you have to look at the symbol table to parse it... Good C looks like poetry, but beginning programmers shouldn't be subjected to any of it. I certainly hate cleaning up the mess! ALGOL, PL/I and similar languages put a lot of work into specifications but nobody really knew how to write a specification that could be implemented back then. C was an early attempt at specification + implementation that was "minimum viable" (almost?) and ready in time to be the bridge between microcomputers and minicomputers. Probably the best idea in C was that you didn't have to agonize over I/O in the language specification but you could just leave it to the stdlib.
    - rileymat2 5y ago
      > strcpy is Turing complete. My google foo is not working, I can’t find a source for this. And am too dull right now to figure it out.
    - nottorp 5y ago
      While I don't like to write more C than strictly necessary (which lately is close to none) I move that everyone should be exposed to C at an early age. If not, they will end up on accidentally quadratic when don't realize what their javascript does behind the scenes. Also, templates are C++ not C.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  > For instance, "parser generators" like yacc, bison and all the rest are absolutely awful. One feature they miss is that you should be able to make a small revision to a grammar with a small code patch. (Say you want to add an "unless(x)" statement to Java that is equivalent to if(!x)" - ought to be 50 lines of code not counting the POM file.) You could do that. Add "unless" to the Flex file and hack the Bison file to interprete 'unless->expression' as an 'if->negation->expression)' when pushing to the abstract syntax tree. You can probably copy paste from the other rules for the hypotetical Flex/Bison Java compiler.
- flashgordon 5y ago
  Actually do you mind expanding on the quality of yacc, bison being awful. I dont mean that as passive "oh yeah?" line to "trap" you. Language front-ends (and their tooling) is something I am pretty passionate about and having developed parser generators in the past (and working on something now) I just wanted to explore specifics that make yacc, bison unweildy for others. Just to start off - I still find their debugging or their (lack of) ability to reason a huge barrier to wannabe language developers. But I am still unable to put this in concrete terms. My last few months has been immersed in reading a ton of papers and I still see the papers use bison as the staging ground for most new ideas (menhir these days seem to be gaining popularity) so curious what is keeping yacc/bison in their throne position?
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    For one thing the callback-based interface in yacc is unergonomic. In a language like C# or Python you usually want to get an object tree for the AST and you shouldn't have to write any code to get that. It should come "for free" with the grammar. Another missing capability that people don't know they are missing is the ability to "unparse" the AST back to text. This is valuable when you want to write a code transformer: for instance in query languages like SQL there is a lot of value in doing a transformation on the query and then writing it back to SQL. You should be able to transform the AST and not have to write a line of code to transform it. Another problem is composability of grammars. If you want to support SQLLite, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle SQL dialects you should have a base SQL grammar and extended grammars that inherit from the base. All of these capabilities are so beyond the pale of what parser generator "insiders" are used to that it's a very hard conversation to communicate that these capabilities are both possible and useful.
    - metadata 5y ago
      Your thinking very closely reflects mine. I actually did build a C# parser generator producing strongly typed AST from base ANSI grammar and inherited Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, and Postgres grammars. We are using it in our database migration products and will soon use it for Resharper style intelligence in a very lightweight and fast database manager. It never occurred to me to publish the parser generator, though. It's our secret sauce.
- calebh 5y ago
  I've worked in a number of spaces that you mentioned. Parser generators are awful, which is why my preferred parser technology are parser combinators. They occupy a nice space between parser generators and handwritten recursive descent parsers. Meta programming is an excellent target, but it usually needs to be directly baked into the language. The closest system I've seen to a nice language agnostic close to meta programming system is Jetbrains MPS and Spoofax Language Workbench. Last time I checked, MPS is mostly dead and Spoofax is only used my programming language researchers. For the Arduino programming stuff, I currently maintain a domain specific functional reactive programming language for Arduinos called Juniper: https://www.juniper-lang.org/ https://www.juniper-lang.org/ However the intersection between people who do Arduino programming and functional programmers is quite small. Also my interest has waned on and off over the years which means there have been long gaps between releases. I just work on it for fun mostly.
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  As a LISP fanatic in the 21st century it feels like we're still waiting for everybody else to leave the 20th century.
nindalf 5y ago
There aren’t more startups creating languages because it’s hard to go up against established incumbents who give away their product for free. Python, Go, JavaScript, Rust and most other mainstream languages thrive on this model. All of them bend over backwards to make it easier for developers to join the ecosystem. Free tools, free learning materials, easy installation, gentle learning curve (as gentle as possible). More developers leads to a flywheel effect of more libraries, more teams taking advantage of the rich ecosystem, more job opportunities cropping up and therefore more developers flocking to the language. If you have a “pop out the credit card” moment at any point you slow adoption and end up with a smaller, poorer ecosystem that finds it hard to compete with the Pythons and Gos. But if your language is targeting a niche where no established FOSS language exists, then a startup would work. Create a language, give it away for free (MIT or Apache ideally), then charge for creating/maintaining niche libraries or other consulting. This is the model chosen by Julia (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9516298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9516298). One of their main competitors is a paid product by MathWorks. Side note - this flywheel effect determining the long term success of programming languages is why discussions around them can get so contentious. A criticism of “your” language could influence an exodus from the developer community around it, making it die slow death. For a person who’s put years into the language, it could mean throwing away all that knowledge and starting afresh elsewhere. So they respond harshly to the criticism, subconsciously hoping that the language ecosystem stays healthy.
- Zababa 5y ago
  Your side note is a really good point. I think it's renforced today with the reliance on libraries. These days, the "blub-iness" [1] of your language is not only the language itself, but mostly the libraries. Also, it's easier to wait for your language to integrate the good part of others (Java/C# with immutable records and pattern matching for example) than to change what you use. I sometimes fear that the more time passes, the harder it will be to start a new programming language. [1]: In reference to why Lisp over other languages, in this article: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
  - native_samples 5y ago
tester34 5y ago
Luna Lang / Enso is visual programming language start up based in Cracow, Poland and they even had office in SF iirc. They have shitton of fancy visualisations, it looks really interesting, but I'm personally not the target for Visual Programming https://enso.org/language https://enso.org/language
- ofrzeta 5y ago
  Looks like Quartz Composer on Mac. Which is quite fun to play around but in the end I prefer a textual interface.
smoldesu 5y ago
Because these same "startups" are much more viable as open-source projects. Sure it doesn't make much money, but monetizing software is an uphill battle anyways. Plus, you won't get a dime out of me for, say, an AI copilot plugin. Unless it's free, and I can guarantee that I'll have access to it in the future, why would I want to integrate something like this into my workflow? Adding another SAAS into my life is just putting my neck under another sword of Damocles.
davnicwil 5y ago
It is extremely difficult to compete with good enough, and it is extremely difficult to compete with free. There are a plethora of good enough free programming languages available, that also have good enough free tooling and ecosystems. There isn't therefore really a business model.
whateveracct 5y ago
Because "avoid (success at all costs)" makes the best PLs, and startups are literally about success at all costs.
rytcio 5y ago
Jon has talked about this on his "Jai" streams. They need some sort of income to fund development of the compiler (hiring more programmers to work on it), but the number of people willing to pay for a compiler is probably not enough to hire programmers
spamizbad 5y ago
The most successful programming language startup (Microsoft) ultimately had to pivot to operating systems to go public and then pivot again to office suites and cloud computing to stay relevant.
- DylanDmitri 5y ago
  More recently they wanted to monetize C#, but found it best to make the language itself free and open source while monetizing through complementary products.
  - spamizbad 5y ago
    I'm sure they still make good money from MSDN subscriptions but the value of that is deeply tied in with Microsoft's own platform (Windows, SQL Server, Azure, etc).
  - andi999 5y ago
    What are complementary products for c#?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - nwatson 5y ago
      Azure, Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange, MS office, Dynamics, anything else in the enterprise suite where C# is a good integrator.
  - nightski 5y ago
    When did they ever want to monetize C#? That is pure FUD. It's been an ecma standard from the start with multiple compiler implementations including Mono since very early 2000s.
    - IshKebab 5y ago
      Yeah but Mono wasn't really close to the official implementation in terms of performance or completeness.
avrionov 5y ago
The article is a little mis-titled. It asks the question about the Programming languages, but it goes into discussion development tools. This the correct framing of the problem, the language itself is very hard sell. It requires an an environment to flourish: libraries, build tools, etc. I'm very excited about the variety of languages which are being actively developed right now. There are 2 major open source projects which are helping quite a bit for the new languages: - Visual Studio Code (Eclipse used to be the choice in the past). Every language can get high quality IDE with a simple integration. - clang & llvm - high quality back-end and common code generation tools. The developer tools market is not going to be extremely big. In most mature companies the R&D costs are up to 15% of the revenue and the dev tools is fraction of that.
InvisibleCities 5y ago
Because programming languages are a public good, and public goods are fundamentally incompatible with a profit motive. A “programming language startup” would be like an “anti-poverty startup” or “social justice startup” - either an edifice doomed to fail because of its inherent contradictions, or a front for lies and grifting.
- samatman 5y ago
  This premise can be trivially disproven with one citation, so I'll choose Clojure and Cognitect. Ok, not fundamentally incompatible, right?
  - lmeyerov 5y ago
    Cognitect was a successful consulting services startup that didn't build a scalable software product/service, right? I'm not sure why they would have sold if they ever figured out how to make a software part of the clojure ecosystem sustainable & growable revenue source, e.g., hosting. In contrast, Julia's recent fundraise is on a successful science tool that happens to be written in Julie, and a hope that hosted Julie might one day pay the bills. But not proven yet. NPM & dockerhub showed repo hosting is tough to succeed on even with wide use, though Anaconda shows promise when mixed with consulting revenue. Jean's article also toes around developers not always being the buyer, so requiring a model more like Twilio, where they are presales/marketing for some other customer. That kind of misalignment adds another level of pain.
    - iLemming 5y ago
      > Cognitect was a successful consulting services startup that didn't build a scalable software product/service, right? I'm not sure what exactly you mean by that, Cognitect is a relatively small company (if I'm not mistaken, there are fewer than 20 engineers work there). And there are plenty of products built on Clojure ecosystem. It scales very well. Cisco, Apple, Walmart, etc., are all successfully built and keep expanding their [massive] Clojure code-bases.
deleted 5y ago
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jcranmer 5y ago
First off, this article isn't actually answering the strawman question it looks like its asking. I think most people who don't work in the space would assume the question means "why aren't there people selling new languages/compilers?" That's a strawman question with a trivial answer, though--free compilers have been the de facto standard for decades [1], so if all you have is a new compiler or a new programming language, you're going to make only a pittance on it directly. The actual question is why are there so few startups for people who work on PL technologies--which isn't limited to compilers or programming languages, but includes things like IDEs, debuggers, static analyzers [2]. For example, Coverity--a decently well-known paid static analyzer--is kind of the best model of what you'd expect to see more of here. So it is somewhat more interesting to ask why this tool space isn't particularly well-served as a market. [1] The biggest exception to the rule is custom hardware (particularly embedded, but this also holds true for mainframe and HPC systems), where custom compilers come for the ride. But that would be a hardware startup, not a PL startup, so it doesn't really count. [2] I tend to lump in decompilers into the formal methods/PL/compilers/software engineering/computer architecture spectrum, mainly being a low-level compiler developer myself, but I suspect most people would consider reverse engineering tools to be a security side of things rather than a PL side things. And decompilers are certainly another noticeable successful paid-software niche, with the very expensive IDA Pro still remaining more or less the industry standard.
- lalaithion 5y ago
  Selling static analyzers are hard. Your customer either has a bunch of code, none of which was written with the static analyzer in mind, and so they have to spend a bunch of time fixing spurious errors and warnings, or they have no code, in which case they probably also have no money to pay you with.
  - NordSteve 5y ago
    I've implemented static analyzers in several codebases, and every time it's paid off in finding multiple "must fix" bugs.
  - acdha 5y ago
jbverschoor 5y ago
Developers don’t pay for languages. Most don’t pay for tooling. Sometimes they do, and they get bitten by it. So never again.
dec0dedab0de 5y ago
One of the big reasons is that developers don't want to be locked in to something. The tool itself needs to be significantly better than the free competition, while still being able to easily pull it out and replace it with something else on short notice. Startups don't generally like those rules, they tend to thrive on lock-in and controlling the users for a chance of a big payday. I think developer tools are generally fit more of a "lifestyle business" than a startup.
api 5y ago
Nobody pays for general use programming languages. The market has been conditioned to believe that dev tools should always be free. Special purpose languages geared toward specific niches like Julia may be able to monetize.
JohnFen 5y ago
I agree with jcrammer in that the question being posed isn't really the one the article seems to be discussing. I read the article as discussing "why aren't there more new programming languages"? So I'll comment on that one instead. As an aside, I've been a professional developer for several decades now, and that's a question that I've heard for my entire career. I think the answer is a combination of things that are impediments to the adoption of new languages of any sort, no matter how much of an improvement they may technically be 1) If there isn't an accessible supply of developers who know the language, using the language becomes risky as a business decision. 2) Related to #1, using a new language is placing a bet: once you've put a lot of time, money, and sweat into developing a codebase in a particular language, if that language falls out of fashion then you're stuck with a codebase in a language that will lack support and a ready supply of developers who know it and are willing to work in it. 3) Career-minded developers will tend to prefer to develop skills that are likely to be in demand with a wider array of potential employers. Much like the bet I talked about above (#2), working in a new language is also a bet being placed by the dev. 4) New languages tend to have immature toolschains. Using them can result in decreased production (and possibly decreased quality) as a result. This problem goes away should the language see widespread adoption, but that takes a while and may not happen. There's a reason that the most-used (as opposed to most popular) languages tend to be ones that have been around for a while. They're safer (from a business point of view). I've also noticed that the newer languages that become popular tend to grow out of hobbyist use. Devs learn and use them for fun in their off time. Some become proficient in them and advocate them to other devs. Once this hobbyist community reaches a critical mass, then companies will begin to entertain using the language, but not before.
michaelbrave 5y ago
A lot of my friends work at companies with legacy code, a lot of which have libraries that they bought where the company isn't even around anymore and it was locked on to a specific system by license, they can't transfer it, can't fix it, can't update it. I won't use a language that isn't open source, I don't trust companies enough, there is a chance they could die, revoke a license or do some other stupid thing that makes it unreliable in the future.
munificent 5y ago
It's a truism that programmers won't use non-free programming languages, but I don't think anyone in this thread has talked about why. I think a key part is that investment in a language goes both directions between programmer and language author. When someone learns a language, they are spending a lot of time and effort to load that language into their head and build expertise in it. That effort amortizes out over the amount of useful software they are able to write in that language in return. When the language is paid and where users have no control over the cost, they can end up in a situation where they are unable to extract value from what they've already learned if the language gets too expensive. It's sort of like asking users to turn a corner of their brain into farmland but then giving the compiler authors the key to the padlock on the fence. Users don't want to give financial control over a part of their own headspace to someone else. Free programming languages ensure that the user can always have access to the value of their own expertise in the language.
- mojuba 5y ago
  That's a very interesting thought and it seems to answer the question in the title (which the linked article doesn't). In theory though there are certain business opportunities in this space that haven't been explored yet, it seems. For example, a faster and better compiler for a popular language that itself is slow, might get some traction. Personally I would pay for a Swift compiler that doesn't take seconds to compile a single long-ish expression with floating point arithmetic, or doesn't take tens of minutes to fully build a project that isn't even that big. Similarly I'd pay for a replacement for Xcode that doesn't have bugs in every single feature it implements. As an iOS developer I'm honestly very tired of and fed up with both Swift's slowness and Xcode's bugginess. There has to be some competition here too, already. In other words, competition is what the PL industry is lacking, I think. But not among the languages themselves as much as among the compilers (and possibly the rest of the tooling and environments). I don't know how we ended up in a world where there's only one compiler per each newly created language. I'm not sure this is normal or it's the way it should be.
  - sanxiyn 5y ago
    > For example, a faster and better compiler for a popular language that itself is slow, might get some traction. I used to think this, but now I am skeptical, because of zapcc. zapcc was almost exactly this: a faster compiler for C++, first propreitary, now open source because it failed. Still no traction.
feifan 5y ago
My personal answer to the titular question is something like "there's only so much you can do with our predominant programming paradigm (i.e. plain-text)". Programming languages specifically can only make incremental improvements and/or tradeoffs in that medium. Tools like IDEs, debuggers, visualizers, etc are more interesting, but I think their effectiveness is also limited (and creativity constrained) by having to work in a plain-text world. Moving beyond plain-text is mostly a social dynamics/network effects problem, and I wouldn't be surprised if the intersection between people who are good at figuring out that distribution × people are who are deeply interested in how programming happens is actually quite small.
- sanxiyn 5y ago
  This is why I am so hopeful for Pernosco, a better debugger with better interface. https://pernos.co/ https://pernos.co/
- c-cube 5y ago
  I think it's the opposite. If you give up on plain text, you forfeit a gigantic number of existing tools (git, grep, editors with their plugins, sed, etc.) and have to redo all of them from scratch. The big issues with making a new language in 2021 are more related to semantic tools, like a LSP server (in which parsing is just the first building block). Just like wiring a compiler is much more than just parsing.
RocketSyntax 5y ago
because you have to build an entire ecosystem from scratch. that's like asking why there aren't more OS startups
- convolvatron 5y ago
  that's the easy part. getting anyone to actually use it...
user3939382 5y ago
I’ve watched what Rich Hickey has gone through with Clojure and Cognitect. I think he did a great job there, but I wouldn’t say I envy the experience he had getting Clojure this far.
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  Would be fascinating to hear his take on it seeing as how he also tried to run a database startup. Nobody outside knows what Datomic's profitability actually looked like, but the fact it was aquihired by a banking startup suggests to me Datomic's financial position was less than compelling.
  - iLemming 5y ago
    "Acquired by a banking startup"? just fyi: Nubank is the largest financial technology bank in Latin America. It's not "some startup".
    - blacktriangle 5y ago
      Man time flies. I remember seeing Nubank employees on the conference circuit back when they really were a startup. They were one of the huge early success stories of Clojure. No disrespect ment to Nubank at all, but the point still stands. I'm pretty sure that Datomic was acquired not for their financials, but to secure the future of the technology that such a now-massive company was built on. In a way I feel like Nubank buying Datomic only validates skeptisim of closed-source database companies, that Nubank felt having their database be a closed source product by a company with an uncertain future was an unacceptable risk. Most startups are not going to have the level of success Nubank did and therefor will not have the same options to mitigate the risk of betting on a closed source db.
v3np 5y ago
A counter-example: https://daml.com/ https://daml.com/ Daml is essentially a smart-contract language using Haskell syntax with built-in primitives for privacy & authorization (e.g., so you don't have to either make your whole ledger public or private) Worth checking out if you're into DLT & PLs! :) Disclaimer: I work for the company developing this.
jeffreyrogers 5y ago
Lot of reasons but mostly because you have to control the platform for most new programming languages to make sense. You want a new language on Apple platforms that isn't Swift? Good luck getting any buy-in from users. One possible path that might work is if you release your language with a framework that is great for some use case. E.g. if Qt were rewritten in some alternative language maybe that could be successful. But to create anything that polished takes a lot of time and effort, so any company is going to burn through capital just getting to a place where they can determine if they've made something users will actually switch to.
CalChris 5y ago
I like Grady Booch's explanation from the Twitter thread: Rational Software was this: founded in 1982, acquired by IBM in 2003 (they outbid Microsoft, who were also interested in acquiring us). They were a number of dev tool companies in that time, but no more: open source makes the economics of this a tough sell these days.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
darig 5y ago
I made a brilliant programming-language startup. HN banned me.
Apocryphon 5y ago
Does Urbit count?
- grumblenum 5y ago
  Not HN approved, sorry. Plus, I don't think that Yarvin still has his mojo since his wife died. He'll be back, but Urbit is way too convoluted to just coast into success.
snicker7 5y ago
Proprietary languages work when they fill a niche. I work with the Q/K programming language. It's closed source and, from what I understand, has a significant licensing fee. But it is a language designed specifically to power trading systems (via the KDB+ platform/ecosystem). It fills a niche well, and is popular in the industry.
mastrsushi 5y ago
A successful programming language is rarely ever something that stands on its own. It’s usually the byproduct of a corporation or some sort of organized committee. It gains relevance through a growing community or standardized through some sort of committee. To answer the question shortly, programming languages aren’t very profitable. There are so many of them in competition with each other and so few that companies can adopt and base their recruitment around. Tech startups usually thrive from apps, services, or valuable technologies. Not yet another programming language.
- grumblenum 5y ago
  >Tech startups usually thrive from apps, services, or valuable technologies. I think an unprecedented abundance of cheap leverage and an inability of investors to make reasonable valuations of highly abstract products should be in that list.
mikewarot 5y ago
Here's my particular story, but I'm sure there are many other people who were burned in ways that are similar. I used to pay for a programming language, Turbo Pascal, which then became Delphi. Then Borland went crazy and started pushing C++, and raising the prices as their focus was lost. Eventually they were sold, and the prices went up, and up. Never again will I be locked into a vendor with a profit motive.
passivate 5y ago
I think we need to look beyond the OS/system level, to the domain and industry level to be able to deliver tools for them as well. Most domains now have a computation element to them, including core sciences, and I feel the tooling is often lacking for doing domain-specific stuff. To give you an example in biotech, our scientists have written scripts for simple automation tasks for their day to day activities, things like programming pumps based on instrumentation parameters on a fermentor. Its a scripting sorta language that is part of a software package used to run the hardware. To a "real" programmer the language used feels like a joke, and usually its not something many non-technical people even attempt to use. This functionality would be improved 100x by PL and tooling experts working on it in conjunction with domain/SMEs.
nullc 5y ago
Why aren't there more human-language startups? ... languages have value substantially due to network effect. By making a proprietary language you hobble the network effect and destroy the language's value. And there aren't startups to create open languages because monetization is a big "then a miracle occurs"-- there is no obvious moat. And at our current level of science re-programmer productivity, it's a lemon market: lots of people say this or that will improve productivity but there aren't much in the way of established ways to prove it. Hard to convince people to pay for something when its benefits aren't unambiguous.
jimsimmons 5y ago
I think Ericsson sold Erlang initially
cwp 5y ago
Taking the question at face value, I think these are the issues: - the switching costs for programming languages are very high, even if you're switching to an established language - it's hard to evaluate a new programming language; you don't know if it's good until you've written something non-trivial - learning a new language takes a lot of effort, particularly for languages that aim to be better than existing languages; better implies different - given all of the above, early adopters will probably not use the language for their day job, they'll use it for hobby projects; hobbyists are price sensitive I don't actually think having to compete with free is actually that much of an issue compared to the above. Even free languages that are genuinely improvements over more mainstream alternatives face multidecade slogs to create a small community and get some adoption.
snidane 5y ago
Because programming languages are the most basic piece of infrastructure on software. And every infrastructure projects suffers from the same issue. It benefits from mass adoption, which basically requires the thing to be free and open source. With that, the value will be captured 0% by the project creators, 10% consultants around the project and 90% cloud providers. The issue is so much more pronounced for programming languages. Why bother..
Zamaamiro 5y ago
Start ups are (ideally) based on ideas for solving existing problems. Programming languages are just a tool to solve a problem, not the solution in and of itself.
webel0 5y ago
The title prompted me to look into the history of matlab a bit [1]. My main takeaways: - It was given away for free for years. During that time people wrote _reliable_ numerical packages that other people glommed onto. - matlab users aren’t programmers, they are [engineers/mathematicians/etc.] who need to write some code to do their job. One aspect of this fact is that they generally aren’t on the hunt for a new “framework” to do this stuff. They also aren’t thinking much about long-term maintainability: they ran it once and got the answers they needed. - Academics (and students who can use university licenses) are price insensitive. - Engineering disciplines where errors can’t happen (civil, aerospace, etc.) come to rely on aforementioned reliable numerical packages, which eventually required proprietary licenses. [1] http://www.tomandmaria.com/Tom/Writing/MolerBio.pdf http://www.tomandmaria.com/Tom/Writing/MolerBio.pdf
kaby76 5y ago
There are many reasons why there are not many PL startups. From my perspective--as a PL tool developer for 40 years--is that we still do not have reliable formal grammars that describe the syntax and static semantics for a given programming language. That is a crux because it is difficult to write a tool for a language when we cannot even define what that language is. When you ask where to find a grammar for the language, the default answer is to just use an "official" implementation. That often requires a large amount of time to find and understand an API--and then locks you into that implementation. Some of the popular languages publish a grammar derived by a human reading the implementation after the fact, prone to errors. For C#, the standards committee is still trying to describe version 6 of the language (https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/tree/main/spec https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/tree/main/spec), and we are now on version 10. An Antlr4 grammar for C# is mechanically reverse engineered from the IR, but it does not work out of the box--it contains several mutual left recursions and does not correctly describe the operator precedence and associativity. Julia does not even have a formal grammar published for the language. You cannot easily refactor a formal grammar from something that does not even exist, and have to write it from scratch. Often, what is published is out of sync from the implementation, not versioned, tied to a particular parser generator and target language with semantic predicates. The quality is suspect because you are unsure whether it even follows a spec. No one bothers to enumerate the refactorings involved in modifying the grammar to fit a parser generator, or for optimization, e.g., speed or memory. Yes, I can agree: “[t]here's definitely a need for SOMETHING, as developers have so much pain.”
alejolp 5y ago
Hey, I want to create my own programming language startup but I don't see how to make a business out of it. Specifically, I want to create an alternative Python compiler with performance in mind. It can be done, there's a lot of ground to cover, but it's just an awful lot of work. It is also a sensible topic to many. DM me if you are interested, thanks!
wink 5y ago
Let's put programming languages aside, but I also question the idea that "there is money to be made with developer tools". a) it seems to be a bit of winner-takes-it-all game here, maybe fragmented by language or ecosystem, but overall still true. IntelliJ is kind of an outlier, but they used to be Java only for a few years, then PHPStorm/WebStorm were kinda halfway accepted, and some other languages as well. n) Also it takes so damn long until a new tool is even considered for widespread use. I remember ~11 years ago when I was more involved in conferences and tooling in the PHP world (and I also wrote my diploma thesis on this) - the broad majority of people only used Jenkins and continuous integration, if at all. Every other tooling was already rare, and don't even think for a moment they'd pay. The few cases that did had Bamboo and Sonar. From what I heard from friends this was not unique to the PHP world. And even in the last 5 years it's the same story. c) I don't see a lot of change in the last 10 years that companies are willing to buy tools for their developers when there's something free to be had and you can save a bit per year. This can be big or small companies, startups or ones.
ModernMech 5y ago
Some recent programming langue startups that are still around or have come and gone: - Dark: https://darklang.com https://darklang.com (hibernating, laid off everyone to buy time to find product/market fit) - Eve: http://witheve.com http://witheve.com (defunct) - Luna/Enso: https://enso.org https://enso.org (just rebranded) - Unison: https://www.unisonweb.org https://www.unisonweb.org (hanging in there) - Urbit: https://urbit.org https://urbit.org (hanging in there) That's off the top of my head. I'm surprised an article asking this doesn't mention any of them or analyze how they came to be and where they went. The main reason from my perspective is there's not funding. It takes years to build a programming language from scratch, so you need a lot of runway. And it takes a specialized group of developers so they cost a lot of money to hire. The combination of the two means you need a lot of money to get a PL off the ground. Millions of dollars. The most likely way to get that kind of money right now is going through VCs, and they aren't going to give you anything for a safer systems language or a JavaScript transpiler. They want to be pitched a world-changing language that will redefine the computing landscape as we know it, and bring billions of people into the programming world. You might notice that as a common denominator among some of the languages I listed above. But this is a research problem with an uncertain time horizon and unknown feasibility. It could take a decade more to complete such a task, but it's very unlikely you're going to get a decade worth of funding from VCs. You'll probably get 3-5 years, and at the end of that you'll need to have something tangible that can get you follow-on funding to continue your work. But that means your original pitch of revolutionizing the computing landscape by democratizing programming gets downgraded to making an incremental change that increases some productivity for developers. Anyway, there are ways to get around this, but it likely means your company won't be a "startup" in the HN VC-funded sense. See Unison which is developed under public benefit corp. Andrew Kelley has managed to bootstrap Zig using user support and now corporate sponsorship. Urbit had an ICO and sells digital real estate.
- pbiggar 5y ago
  Fyi, Dark isn't hibernating. It's actively being worked on. See the repo: https://GitHub.com/Darklang/dark https://GitHub.com/Darklang/dark

106 points by mpweiher 5y ago

I have been thinking about the topic for a while and the article seems a bit wrongheaded to me. (e.g. you just can't save time by deliberately making tools that aren't 100% correct as much as everyone wishes they could.) For instance, "parser generators" like yacc, bison and all the rest are absolutely awful. One feature they miss is that you should be able to make a small revision to a grammar with a small code patch. (Say you want to add an "unless(x)" statement to Java that is equivalent to if(!x)" - ought to be 50 lines of code not counting the POM file.) I think a better parser generator could open up "compiler programming" and "meta programming" to a wider audience and get LISP fanatics into the 21st century, but it never happens. Anybody who understands the problem enough to solve the problem will settle for a half-baked answer; the labor input to go from "the author can use it" to "revolutionary new parser generator" is a factor of 10x and there is some risk that people still won't get it. Programming the AVR-8 Arduino it's hard to miss the conclusion that "C sucks" but anything really better (say Supercharged Pascal or a Miracle Macro Assembler) would take a huge amount of fit and finish work to make it something that would really beat C. For pedagogical purposes you can argue that C rots the mind like BASIC but you can't argue that learning C is a waste of time. To make a profitable business out of any of the above seems almost impossible.

cellularmitosis 5y ago
The high barrier to entry for creating dev tools is truly a shame, and something I think about a lot.
- TuringTest 5y ago
  The mental model distance between dev tools and user tools is simply too large. Dev tools are still too anchored in the 50's model of source-code >> compilation >> runtime code, when consumer products have a much more healthy mixture of active content and tool palletes working on the content. Heck, even the guy in the article asks about "Programming Languages Startups" when he means "Integrated development startups". This difference is shrinking in the web, both client (DevTools run like an app inside the browser, with live changes to the code reflected instantly in the page) and the cloud (the entry point interface is a collection of collections, where you can inspect and operate on any component running in the system, and even create some kinds of workflows in the live environment). But the lowest level for designing components relies on specifying a fully formed program in formal code, and having to run a build-deploy-test cycle without errors before seeing whether it works, instead of having code and data run side by side to see how the code behaves. I put my hopes in online notebooks, but these are used mainly for data analysis, and "true developers" seem determined to ignore them.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    The gap from an "online notebook" to "here's the script to run the monthly report" or "here's the model complete with training and inference that anybody can retrain" is wide. Yet it's the difference between a data scientist making an occasional report to putting their expertise on wheels that makes it worth paying for.
    - TuringTest 5y ago
      Notebooks don't need to be online. You can run a local notebook same way as you run a local IDE. The most significant difference is that the notebook always has runtime information about how the available information is being processed, while the IDE only has this information available while it's in debug mode. The first model provides much more information about the system behaviour, easier to access.
  - JohnFen 5y ago
    > I put my hopes in online notebooks, but these are used mainly for data analysis, and "true developers" seem determined to ignore them. This is merely my own personal preference, not an assertion that my stance is correct or common. For development, it's important to me that I can put the toolchain into version control along with the code. This ensures that I can check out a build that is years old and be able to build it without issue. SaaS solutions break this for me, so I avoid them to the greatest extent that I can. If it's cloudy, then it can change without warning or recourse. That's a problem. For that reason, I would never seriously entertain using something like a netbook for development.
    - TuringTest 5y ago
      You can use toolchains with notebook software, provided a) the notebook has an internal text representation that can be version-controlled, and b) the notebook follows a spreadsheet-loke paradigm with incremental non-mutable data structures, so that all state is represented consistently at all times (no dependence on what order you've run the cells in the current session).
brundolf 5y ago
I had the idea a while back to do a parser-generator in the form of Rust macros, which would mean a) you don't have to source-control a giant pile of generated files, and b) you get real-time editor integration without a separate "generate" step. I got out of my depth trying to get the actual macros to process the BNF (it gets very meta because Rust's declarative macros are themselves written in a very BNF-like syntax), but I still think this would be possible and pretty cool
Ar-Curunir 5y ago
I don't think parsing is the hard part of designing a compiler any more
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  It's not the hard part of "designing a compiler" but who wants to "design a compiler?" In ordinary software people spend most of their time modifying existing code. I wouldn't want to reinvent "javac" or "cpython" but adding a new feature to a compiler like that should be easy. Alternately there are a number of "compiler-technology based tools" that we don't have. Instead we get problems like https://www.liquibase.org/ https://www.liquibase.org/ which defines a whole new XML-based language to manage database changes. That's like jumping from the frying pan to the fire since you're still going to have to understand your RDBMS, how to write SQL for it, what the non-standard features are in your database, etc. A sane tool like that would use an extensible parser generator to easily support the variant syntaxes of different SQL dialects and would be able to parse and unparse SQL or a variant of SQL to define change sets. (speaking of which... shouldn't a compiler generator automatically make something that can reverse the AST back to source code? how about round-tripping source code comments, formatting and all like some CASE tools did in the 1990s?) A while back I had the problem that arangodb scrambled the order of columns in JSON result sets and wrote something that parsed the AQL, figured out what the order of the columns was, and turned the result sets into nice pandas frames. If "writing compilers" was easier people would write "compilers" that do things other than compiling to machine code.
  - phillipcarter 5y ago
    > but who wants to "design a compiler?" Lots of people, actually! Just in recent years, Golang, TypeScript, and Rust have shown there's plenty of demand for new languages (compilers!) as developers and their requirements keep evolving. Given how expensive and time-consuming languages are to build and evolve, I'm honestly flabbergasted that we've seen 3+ languages come of age in the past decade and break into the mainstream.
    - nottorp 5y ago
blippage 5y ago
> Programming the AVR-8 Arduino it's hard to miss the conclusion that "C sucks" but anything really better (say Supercharged Pascal or a Miracle Macro Assembler) I did see an Ada compiler for the AVR recently (I'm not an Ada programmer). It seemed unpolished, and not really an advancement on C. I think one problem with embedded work is that you either stick to the low-level, in which case you have no advantage over C, or you go for high-level, in which case you have convenience but lose flexibility. In terms of meta programming, Val Schorre has an interesting idea with META-II. Both Alan Kay and Joe Armstrong spoke highly of it.The compiler has its own assembly language. I had this goofy idea of writing a Basic-like language that replaced the assembly. So you'd have a language that was both high-level Basic and a compiler. It would embrace the GOTO, because META-II also generates GOTOs, and GOTOs are a natural fit for CPS (Continuation Passing Style) used by many compilers.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  Personally I find bit-twiddling in C to be painful compared to bit twiddling in assembly. For my Arduino projects in particular I never make recursive function calls, and would be happy to statically allocate everything in RAM. The stack-oriented activation records in C, calling conventions, return values, are more a problem than a solution.
  - calebh 5y ago
    For call graphs without cycles it should be possible to run static analysis to determine the maximum amount of memory taken by your program at any point, assuming you don't use things like malloc or alloca or dynamically sized arrays.
s17n 5y ago
"you just can't save time by deliberately making tools that aren't 100% correct as much as everyone wishes they could." The point was about application development - you can save time by making applications that aren't 100% correct. In most software, any bug is OK as long as it happens a small enough percentage of the time.
drannex 5y ago
> but anything really better (say Supercharged Pascal or a Miracle Macro Assembler) would take a huge amount of fit and finish work to make it something that would really beat C. Zig is trying to work in this space, and they seem to be getting rather close to the ideal.
908B64B197 5y ago
> For pedagogical purposes you can argue that C rots the mind like BASIC but you can't argue that learning C is a waste of time. That's a strong statement. C's biggest flaw is that it lies about the underlying memory, but it's a small language that's especially suited to be easy to port.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  If you are exposed to too much C you can't see the C-thulhu. Undefined behavior is normal. The whole relationship between .h and .c files is sick. How you use the "extern" keyword is arbitrary. strcpy is Turing complete. It took a while for people to realize templates are Turing omplete. I'm not sure where the grammar fits in the Chomksy Hierarchy since you have to look at the symbol table to parse it... Good C looks like poetry, but beginning programmers shouldn't be subjected to any of it. I certainly hate cleaning up the mess! ALGOL, PL/I and similar languages put a lot of work into specifications but nobody really knew how to write a specification that could be implemented back then. C was an early attempt at specification + implementation that was "minimum viable" (almost?) and ready in time to be the bridge between microcomputers and minicomputers. Probably the best idea in C was that you didn't have to agonize over I/O in the language specification but you could just leave it to the stdlib.
  - rileymat2 5y ago
    > strcpy is Turing complete. My google foo is not working, I can’t find a source for this. And am too dull right now to figure it out.
  - nottorp 5y ago
    While I don't like to write more C than strictly necessary (which lately is close to none) I move that everyone should be exposed to C at an early age. If not, they will end up on accidentally quadratic when don't realize what their javascript does behind the scenes. Also, templates are C++ not C.
rightbyte 5y ago
> For instance, "parser generators" like yacc, bison and all the rest are absolutely awful. One feature they miss is that you should be able to make a small revision to a grammar with a small code patch. (Say you want to add an "unless(x)" statement to Java that is equivalent to if(!x)" - ought to be 50 lines of code not counting the POM file.) You could do that. Add "unless" to the Flex file and hack the Bison file to interprete 'unless->expression' as an 'if->negation->expression)' when pushing to the abstract syntax tree. You can probably copy paste from the other rules for the hypotetical Flex/Bison Java compiler.
flashgordon 5y ago
Actually do you mind expanding on the quality of yacc, bison being awful. I dont mean that as passive "oh yeah?" line to "trap" you. Language front-ends (and their tooling) is something I am pretty passionate about and having developed parser generators in the past (and working on something now) I just wanted to explore specifics that make yacc, bison unweildy for others. Just to start off - I still find their debugging or their (lack of) ability to reason a huge barrier to wannabe language developers. But I am still unable to put this in concrete terms. My last few months has been immersed in reading a ton of papers and I still see the papers use bison as the staging ground for most new ideas (menhir these days seem to be gaining popularity) so curious what is keeping yacc/bison in their throne position?
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  For one thing the callback-based interface in yacc is unergonomic. In a language like C# or Python you usually want to get an object tree for the AST and you shouldn't have to write any code to get that. It should come "for free" with the grammar. Another missing capability that people don't know they are missing is the ability to "unparse" the AST back to text. This is valuable when you want to write a code transformer: for instance in query languages like SQL there is a lot of value in doing a transformation on the query and then writing it back to SQL. You should be able to transform the AST and not have to write a line of code to transform it. Another problem is composability of grammars. If you want to support SQLLite, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle SQL dialects you should have a base SQL grammar and extended grammars that inherit from the base. All of these capabilities are so beyond the pale of what parser generator "insiders" are used to that it's a very hard conversation to communicate that these capabilities are both possible and useful.
  - metadata 5y ago
    Your thinking very closely reflects mine. I actually did build a C# parser generator producing strongly typed AST from base ANSI grammar and inherited Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, and Postgres grammars. We are using it in our database migration products and will soon use it for Resharper style intelligence in a very lightweight and fast database manager. It never occurred to me to publish the parser generator, though. It's our secret sauce.
calebh 5y ago
I've worked in a number of spaces that you mentioned. Parser generators are awful, which is why my preferred parser technology are parser combinators. They occupy a nice space between parser generators and handwritten recursive descent parsers. Meta programming is an excellent target, but it usually needs to be directly baked into the language. The closest system I've seen to a nice language agnostic close to meta programming system is Jetbrains MPS and Spoofax Language Workbench. Last time I checked, MPS is mostly dead and Spoofax is only used my programming language researchers. For the Arduino programming stuff, I currently maintain a domain specific functional reactive programming language for Arduinos called Juniper: https://www.juniper-lang.org/ https://www.juniper-lang.org/ However the intersection between people who do Arduino programming and functional programmers is quite small. Also my interest has waned on and off over the years which means there have been long gaps between releases. I just work on it for fun mostly.
blacktriangle 5y ago
As a LISP fanatic in the 21st century it feels like we're still waiting for everybody else to leave the 20th century.

nindalf 5y ago

There aren’t more startups creating languages because it’s hard to go up against established incumbents who give away their product for free. Python, Go, JavaScript, Rust and most other mainstream languages thrive on this model. All of them bend over backwards to make it easier for developers to join the ecosystem. Free tools, free learning materials, easy installation, gentle learning curve (as gentle as possible). More developers leads to a flywheel effect of more libraries, more teams taking advantage of the rich ecosystem, more job opportunities cropping up and therefore more developers flocking to the language. If you have a “pop out the credit card” moment at any point you slow adoption and end up with a smaller, poorer ecosystem that finds it hard to compete with the Pythons and Gos. But if your language is targeting a niche where no established FOSS language exists, then a startup would work. Create a language, give it away for free (MIT or Apache ideally), then charge for creating/maintaining niche libraries or other consulting. This is the model chosen by Julia (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9516298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9516298). One of their main competitors is a paid product by MathWorks. Side note - this flywheel effect determining the long term success of programming languages is why discussions around them can get so contentious. A criticism of “your” language could influence an exodus from the developer community around it, making it die slow death. For a person who’s put years into the language, it could mean throwing away all that knowledge and starting afresh elsewhere. So they respond harshly to the criticism, subconsciously hoping that the language ecosystem stays healthy.

Zababa 5y ago
Your side note is a really good point. I think it's renforced today with the reliance on libraries. These days, the "blub-iness" [1] of your language is not only the language itself, but mostly the libraries. Also, it's easier to wait for your language to integrate the good part of others (Java/C# with immutable records and pattern matching for example) than to change what you use. I sometimes fear that the more time passes, the harder it will be to start a new programming language. [1]: In reference to why Lisp over other languages, in this article: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
- native_samples 5y ago

tester34 5y ago

Luna Lang / Enso is visual programming language start up based in Cracow, Poland and they even had office in SF iirc. They have shitton of fancy visualisations, it looks really interesting, but I'm personally not the target for Visual Programming https://enso.org/language https://enso.org/language

ofrzeta 5y ago
Looks like Quartz Composer on Mac. Which is quite fun to play around but in the end I prefer a textual interface.

smoldesu 5y ago

Because these same "startups" are much more viable as open-source projects. Sure it doesn't make much money, but monetizing software is an uphill battle anyways. Plus, you won't get a dime out of me for, say, an AI copilot plugin. Unless it's free, and I can guarantee that I'll have access to it in the future, why would I want to integrate something like this into my workflow? Adding another SAAS into my life is just putting my neck under another sword of Damocles.

davnicwil 5y ago

It is extremely difficult to compete with good enough, and it is extremely difficult to compete with free. There are a plethora of good enough free programming languages available, that also have good enough free tooling and ecosystems. There isn't therefore really a business model.

whateveracct 5y ago

Because "avoid (success at all costs)" makes the best PLs, and startups are literally about success at all costs.

rytcio 5y ago

Jon has talked about this on his "Jai" streams. They need some sort of income to fund development of the compiler (hiring more programmers to work on it), but the number of people willing to pay for a compiler is probably not enough to hire programmers

spamizbad 5y ago

The most successful programming language startup (Microsoft) ultimately had to pivot to operating systems to go public and then pivot again to office suites and cloud computing to stay relevant.

DylanDmitri 5y ago
More recently they wanted to monetize C#, but found it best to make the language itself free and open source while monetizing through complementary products.
- spamizbad 5y ago
  I'm sure they still make good money from MSDN subscriptions but the value of that is deeply tied in with Microsoft's own platform (Windows, SQL Server, Azure, etc).
- andi999 5y ago
  What are complementary products for c#?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - nwatson 5y ago
    Azure, Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange, MS office, Dynamics, anything else in the enterprise suite where C# is a good integrator.
- nightski 5y ago
  When did they ever want to monetize C#? That is pure FUD. It's been an ecma standard from the start with multiple compiler implementations including Mono since very early 2000s.
  - IshKebab 5y ago
    Yeah but Mono wasn't really close to the official implementation in terms of performance or completeness.

avrionov 5y ago

The article is a little mis-titled. It asks the question about the Programming languages, but it goes into discussion development tools. This the correct framing of the problem, the language itself is very hard sell. It requires an an environment to flourish: libraries, build tools, etc. I'm very excited about the variety of languages which are being actively developed right now. There are 2 major open source projects which are helping quite a bit for the new languages: - Visual Studio Code (Eclipse used to be the choice in the past). Every language can get high quality IDE with a simple integration. - clang & llvm - high quality back-end and common code generation tools. The developer tools market is not going to be extremely big. In most mature companies the R&D costs are up to 15% of the revenue and the dev tools is fraction of that.

InvisibleCities 5y ago

Because programming languages are a public good, and public goods are fundamentally incompatible with a profit motive. A “programming language startup” would be like an “anti-poverty startup” or “social justice startup” - either an edifice doomed to fail because of its inherent contradictions, or a front for lies and grifting.

samatman 5y ago
This premise can be trivially disproven with one citation, so I'll choose Clojure and Cognitect. Ok, not fundamentally incompatible, right?
- lmeyerov 5y ago
  Cognitect was a successful consulting services startup that didn't build a scalable software product/service, right? I'm not sure why they would have sold if they ever figured out how to make a software part of the clojure ecosystem sustainable & growable revenue source, e.g., hosting. In contrast, Julia's recent fundraise is on a successful science tool that happens to be written in Julie, and a hope that hosted Julie might one day pay the bills. But not proven yet. NPM & dockerhub showed repo hosting is tough to succeed on even with wide use, though Anaconda shows promise when mixed with consulting revenue. Jean's article also toes around developers not always being the buyer, so requiring a model more like Twilio, where they are presales/marketing for some other customer. That kind of misalignment adds another level of pain.
  - iLemming 5y ago
    > Cognitect was a successful consulting services startup that didn't build a scalable software product/service, right? I'm not sure what exactly you mean by that, Cognitect is a relatively small company (if I'm not mistaken, there are fewer than 20 engineers work there). And there are plenty of products built on Clojure ecosystem. It scales very well. Cisco, Apple, Walmart, etc., are all successfully built and keep expanding their [massive] Clojure code-bases.

deleted 5y ago

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jcranmer 5y ago

First off, this article isn't actually answering the strawman question it looks like its asking. I think most people who don't work in the space would assume the question means "why aren't there people selling new languages/compilers?" That's a strawman question with a trivial answer, though--free compilers have been the de facto standard for decades [1], so if all you have is a new compiler or a new programming language, you're going to make only a pittance on it directly. The actual question is why are there so few startups for people who work on PL technologies--which isn't limited to compilers or programming languages, but includes things like IDEs, debuggers, static analyzers [2]. For example, Coverity--a decently well-known paid static analyzer--is kind of the best model of what you'd expect to see more of here. So it is somewhat more interesting to ask why this tool space isn't particularly well-served as a market. [1] The biggest exception to the rule is custom hardware (particularly embedded, but this also holds true for mainframe and HPC systems), where custom compilers come for the ride. But that would be a hardware startup, not a PL startup, so it doesn't really count. [2] I tend to lump in decompilers into the formal methods/PL/compilers/software engineering/computer architecture spectrum, mainly being a low-level compiler developer myself, but I suspect most people would consider reverse engineering tools to be a security side of things rather than a PL side things. And decompilers are certainly another noticeable successful paid-software niche, with the very expensive IDA Pro still remaining more or less the industry standard.

lalaithion 5y ago
Selling static analyzers are hard. Your customer either has a bunch of code, none of which was written with the static analyzer in mind, and so they have to spend a bunch of time fixing spurious errors and warnings, or they have no code, in which case they probably also have no money to pay you with.
- NordSteve 5y ago
  I've implemented static analyzers in several codebases, and every time it's paid off in finding multiple "must fix" bugs.
- acdha 5y ago

jbverschoor 5y ago

Developers don’t pay for languages. Most don’t pay for tooling. Sometimes they do, and they get bitten by it. So never again.

dec0dedab0de 5y ago

One of the big reasons is that developers don't want to be locked in to something. The tool itself needs to be significantly better than the free competition, while still being able to easily pull it out and replace it with something else on short notice. Startups don't generally like those rules, they tend to thrive on lock-in and controlling the users for a chance of a big payday. I think developer tools are generally fit more of a "lifestyle business" than a startup.

api 5y ago

Nobody pays for general use programming languages. The market has been conditioned to believe that dev tools should always be free. Special purpose languages geared toward specific niches like Julia may be able to monetize.

JohnFen 5y ago

I agree with jcrammer in that the question being posed isn't really the one the article seems to be discussing. I read the article as discussing "why aren't there more new programming languages"? So I'll comment on that one instead. As an aside, I've been a professional developer for several decades now, and that's a question that I've heard for my entire career. I think the answer is a combination of things that are impediments to the adoption of new languages of any sort, no matter how much of an improvement they may technically be 1) If there isn't an accessible supply of developers who know the language, using the language becomes risky as a business decision. 2) Related to #1, using a new language is placing a bet: once you've put a lot of time, money, and sweat into developing a codebase in a particular language, if that language falls out of fashion then you're stuck with a codebase in a language that will lack support and a ready supply of developers who know it and are willing to work in it. 3) Career-minded developers will tend to prefer to develop skills that are likely to be in demand with a wider array of potential employers. Much like the bet I talked about above (#2), working in a new language is also a bet being placed by the dev. 4) New languages tend to have immature toolschains. Using them can result in decreased production (and possibly decreased quality) as a result. This problem goes away should the language see widespread adoption, but that takes a while and may not happen. There's a reason that the most-used (as opposed to most popular) languages tend to be ones that have been around for a while. They're safer (from a business point of view). I've also noticed that the newer languages that become popular tend to grow out of hobbyist use. Devs learn and use them for fun in their off time. Some become proficient in them and advocate them to other devs. Once this hobbyist community reaches a critical mass, then companies will begin to entertain using the language, but not before.

michaelbrave 5y ago

A lot of my friends work at companies with legacy code, a lot of which have libraries that they bought where the company isn't even around anymore and it was locked on to a specific system by license, they can't transfer it, can't fix it, can't update it. I won't use a language that isn't open source, I don't trust companies enough, there is a chance they could die, revoke a license or do some other stupid thing that makes it unreliable in the future.

munificent 5y ago

It's a truism that programmers won't use non-free programming languages, but I don't think anyone in this thread has talked about why. I think a key part is that investment in a language goes both directions between programmer and language author. When someone learns a language, they are spending a lot of time and effort to load that language into their head and build expertise in it. That effort amortizes out over the amount of useful software they are able to write in that language in return. When the language is paid and where users have no control over the cost, they can end up in a situation where they are unable to extract value from what they've already learned if the language gets too expensive. It's sort of like asking users to turn a corner of their brain into farmland but then giving the compiler authors the key to the padlock on the fence. Users don't want to give financial control over a part of their own headspace to someone else. Free programming languages ensure that the user can always have access to the value of their own expertise in the language.

mojuba 5y ago
That's a very interesting thought and it seems to answer the question in the title (which the linked article doesn't). In theory though there are certain business opportunities in this space that haven't been explored yet, it seems. For example, a faster and better compiler for a popular language that itself is slow, might get some traction. Personally I would pay for a Swift compiler that doesn't take seconds to compile a single long-ish expression with floating point arithmetic, or doesn't take tens of minutes to fully build a project that isn't even that big. Similarly I'd pay for a replacement for Xcode that doesn't have bugs in every single feature it implements. As an iOS developer I'm honestly very tired of and fed up with both Swift's slowness and Xcode's bugginess. There has to be some competition here too, already. In other words, competition is what the PL industry is lacking, I think. But not among the languages themselves as much as among the compilers (and possibly the rest of the tooling and environments). I don't know how we ended up in a world where there's only one compiler per each newly created language. I'm not sure this is normal or it's the way it should be.
- sanxiyn 5y ago
  > For example, a faster and better compiler for a popular language that itself is slow, might get some traction. I used to think this, but now I am skeptical, because of zapcc. zapcc was almost exactly this: a faster compiler for C++, first propreitary, now open source because it failed. Still no traction.

feifan 5y ago

My personal answer to the titular question is something like "there's only so much you can do with our predominant programming paradigm (i.e. plain-text)". Programming languages specifically can only make incremental improvements and/or tradeoffs in that medium. Tools like IDEs, debuggers, visualizers, etc are more interesting, but I think their effectiveness is also limited (and creativity constrained) by having to work in a plain-text world. Moving beyond plain-text is mostly a social dynamics/network effects problem, and I wouldn't be surprised if the intersection between people who are good at figuring out that distribution × people are who are deeply interested in how programming happens is actually quite small.

sanxiyn 5y ago
This is why I am so hopeful for Pernosco, a better debugger with better interface. https://pernos.co/ https://pernos.co/
c-cube 5y ago
I think it's the opposite. If you give up on plain text, you forfeit a gigantic number of existing tools (git, grep, editors with their plugins, sed, etc.) and have to redo all of them from scratch. The big issues with making a new language in 2021 are more related to semantic tools, like a LSP server (in which parsing is just the first building block). Just like wiring a compiler is much more than just parsing.

RocketSyntax 5y ago

because you have to build an entire ecosystem from scratch. that's like asking why there aren't more OS startups

convolvatron 5y ago
that's the easy part. getting anyone to actually use it...

user3939382 5y ago

I’ve watched what Rich Hickey has gone through with Clojure and Cognitect. I think he did a great job there, but I wouldn’t say I envy the experience he had getting Clojure this far.

blacktriangle 5y ago
Would be fascinating to hear his take on it seeing as how he also tried to run a database startup. Nobody outside knows what Datomic's profitability actually looked like, but the fact it was aquihired by a banking startup suggests to me Datomic's financial position was less than compelling.
- iLemming 5y ago
  "Acquired by a banking startup"? just fyi: Nubank is the largest financial technology bank in Latin America. It's not "some startup".
  - blacktriangle 5y ago
    Man time flies. I remember seeing Nubank employees on the conference circuit back when they really were a startup. They were one of the huge early success stories of Clojure. No disrespect ment to Nubank at all, but the point still stands. I'm pretty sure that Datomic was acquired not for their financials, but to secure the future of the technology that such a now-massive company was built on. In a way I feel like Nubank buying Datomic only validates skeptisim of closed-source database companies, that Nubank felt having their database be a closed source product by a company with an uncertain future was an unacceptable risk. Most startups are not going to have the level of success Nubank did and therefor will not have the same options to mitigate the risk of betting on a closed source db.

v3np 5y ago

A counter-example: https://daml.com/ https://daml.com/ Daml is essentially a smart-contract language using Haskell syntax with built-in primitives for privacy & authorization (e.g., so you don't have to either make your whole ledger public or private) Worth checking out if you're into DLT & PLs! :) Disclaimer: I work for the company developing this.

jeffreyrogers 5y ago

Lot of reasons but mostly because you have to control the platform for most new programming languages to make sense. You want a new language on Apple platforms that isn't Swift? Good luck getting any buy-in from users. One possible path that might work is if you release your language with a framework that is great for some use case. E.g. if Qt were rewritten in some alternative language maybe that could be successful. But to create anything that polished takes a lot of time and effort, so any company is going to burn through capital just getting to a place where they can determine if they've made something users will actually switch to.

CalChris 5y ago

I like Grady Booch's explanation from the Twitter thread: Rational Software was this: founded in 1982, acquired by IBM in 2003 (they outbid Microsoft, who were also interested in acquiring us). They were a number of dev tool companies in that time, but no more: open source makes the economics of this a tough sell these days.

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darig 5y ago

I made a brilliant programming-language startup. HN banned me.

Apocryphon 5y ago

Does Urbit count?

grumblenum 5y ago
Not HN approved, sorry. Plus, I don't think that Yarvin still has his mojo since his wife died. He'll be back, but Urbit is way too convoluted to just coast into success.

snicker7 5y ago

Proprietary languages work when they fill a niche. I work with the Q/K programming language. It's closed source and, from what I understand, has a significant licensing fee. But it is a language designed specifically to power trading systems (via the KDB+ platform/ecosystem). It fills a niche well, and is popular in the industry.

mastrsushi 5y ago

A successful programming language is rarely ever something that stands on its own. It’s usually the byproduct of a corporation or some sort of organized committee. It gains relevance through a growing community or standardized through some sort of committee. To answer the question shortly, programming languages aren’t very profitable. There are so many of them in competition with each other and so few that companies can adopt and base their recruitment around. Tech startups usually thrive from apps, services, or valuable technologies. Not yet another programming language.

grumblenum 5y ago
>Tech startups usually thrive from apps, services, or valuable technologies. I think an unprecedented abundance of cheap leverage and an inability of investors to make reasonable valuations of highly abstract products should be in that list.

mikewarot 5y ago

Here's my particular story, but I'm sure there are many other people who were burned in ways that are similar. I used to pay for a programming language, Turbo Pascal, which then became Delphi. Then Borland went crazy and started pushing C++, and raising the prices as their focus was lost. Eventually they were sold, and the prices went up, and up. Never again will I be locked into a vendor with a profit motive.

passivate 5y ago

I think we need to look beyond the OS/system level, to the domain and industry level to be able to deliver tools for them as well. Most domains now have a computation element to them, including core sciences, and I feel the tooling is often lacking for doing domain-specific stuff. To give you an example in biotech, our scientists have written scripts for simple automation tasks for their day to day activities, things like programming pumps based on instrumentation parameters on a fermentor. Its a scripting sorta language that is part of a software package used to run the hardware. To a "real" programmer the language used feels like a joke, and usually its not something many non-technical people even attempt to use. This functionality would be improved 100x by PL and tooling experts working on it in conjunction with domain/SMEs.

nullc 5y ago

Why aren't there more human-language startups? ... languages have value substantially due to network effect. By making a proprietary language you hobble the network effect and destroy the language's value. And there aren't startups to create open languages because monetization is a big "then a miracle occurs"-- there is no obvious moat. And at our current level of science re-programmer productivity, it's a lemon market: lots of people say this or that will improve productivity but there aren't much in the way of established ways to prove it. Hard to convince people to pay for something when its benefits aren't unambiguous.

jimsimmons 5y ago

I think Ericsson sold Erlang initially

cwp 5y ago

Taking the question at face value, I think these are the issues: - the switching costs for programming languages are very high, even if you're switching to an established language - it's hard to evaluate a new programming language; you don't know if it's good until you've written something non-trivial - learning a new language takes a lot of effort, particularly for languages that aim to be better than existing languages; better implies different - given all of the above, early adopters will probably not use the language for their day job, they'll use it for hobby projects; hobbyists are price sensitive I don't actually think having to compete with free is actually that much of an issue compared to the above. Even free languages that are genuinely improvements over more mainstream alternatives face multidecade slogs to create a small community and get some adoption.

snidane 5y ago

Because programming languages are the most basic piece of infrastructure on software. And every infrastructure projects suffers from the same issue. It benefits from mass adoption, which basically requires the thing to be free and open source. With that, the value will be captured 0% by the project creators, 10% consultants around the project and 90% cloud providers. The issue is so much more pronounced for programming languages. Why bother..

Zamaamiro 5y ago

Start ups are (ideally) based on ideas for solving existing problems. Programming languages are just a tool to solve a problem, not the solution in and of itself.

webel0 5y ago

The title prompted me to look into the history of matlab a bit [1]. My main takeaways: - It was given away for free for years. During that time people wrote _reliable_ numerical packages that other people glommed onto. - matlab users aren’t programmers, they are [engineers/mathematicians/etc.] who need to write some code to do their job. One aspect of this fact is that they generally aren’t on the hunt for a new “framework” to do this stuff. They also aren’t thinking much about long-term maintainability: they ran it once and got the answers they needed. - Academics (and students who can use university licenses) are price insensitive. - Engineering disciplines where errors can’t happen (civil, aerospace, etc.) come to rely on aforementioned reliable numerical packages, which eventually required proprietary licenses. [1] http://www.tomandmaria.com/Tom/Writing/MolerBio.pdf http://www.tomandmaria.com/Tom/Writing/MolerBio.pdf

kaby76 5y ago

There are many reasons why there are not many PL startups. From my perspective--as a PL tool developer for 40 years--is that we still do not have reliable formal grammars that describe the syntax and static semantics for a given programming language. That is a crux because it is difficult to write a tool for a language when we cannot even define what that language is. When you ask where to find a grammar for the language, the default answer is to just use an "official" implementation. That often requires a large amount of time to find and understand an API--and then locks you into that implementation. Some of the popular languages publish a grammar derived by a human reading the implementation after the fact, prone to errors. For C#, the standards committee is still trying to describe version 6 of the language (https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/tree/main/spec https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/tree/main/spec), and we are now on version 10. An Antlr4 grammar for C# is mechanically reverse engineered from the IR, but it does not work out of the box--it contains several mutual left recursions and does not correctly describe the operator precedence and associativity. Julia does not even have a formal grammar published for the language. You cannot easily refactor a formal grammar from something that does not even exist, and have to write it from scratch. Often, what is published is out of sync from the implementation, not versioned, tied to a particular parser generator and target language with semantic predicates. The quality is suspect because you are unsure whether it even follows a spec. No one bothers to enumerate the refactorings involved in modifying the grammar to fit a parser generator, or for optimization, e.g., speed or memory. Yes, I can agree: “[t]here's definitely a need for SOMETHING, as developers have so much pain.”

alejolp 5y ago

Hey, I want to create my own programming language startup but I don't see how to make a business out of it. Specifically, I want to create an alternative Python compiler with performance in mind. It can be done, there's a lot of ground to cover, but it's just an awful lot of work. It is also a sensible topic to many. DM me if you are interested, thanks!

wink 5y ago

Let's put programming languages aside, but I also question the idea that "there is money to be made with developer tools". a) it seems to be a bit of winner-takes-it-all game here, maybe fragmented by language or ecosystem, but overall still true. IntelliJ is kind of an outlier, but they used to be Java only for a few years, then PHPStorm/WebStorm were kinda halfway accepted, and some other languages as well. n) Also it takes so damn long until a new tool is even considered for widespread use. I remember ~11 years ago when I was more involved in conferences and tooling in the PHP world (and I also wrote my diploma thesis on this) - the broad majority of people only used Jenkins and continuous integration, if at all. Every other tooling was already rare, and don't even think for a moment they'd pay. The few cases that did had Bamboo and Sonar. From what I heard from friends this was not unique to the PHP world. And even in the last 5 years it's the same story. c) I don't see a lot of change in the last 10 years that companies are willing to buy tools for their developers when there's something free to be had and you can save a bit per year. This can be big or small companies, startups or ones.

ModernMech 5y ago

Some recent programming langue startups that are still around or have come and gone: - Dark: https://darklang.com https://darklang.com (hibernating, laid off everyone to buy time to find product/market fit) - Eve: http://witheve.com http://witheve.com (defunct) - Luna/Enso: https://enso.org https://enso.org (just rebranded) - Unison: https://www.unisonweb.org https://www.unisonweb.org (hanging in there) - Urbit: https://urbit.org https://urbit.org (hanging in there) That's off the top of my head. I'm surprised an article asking this doesn't mention any of them or analyze how they came to be and where they went. The main reason from my perspective is there's not funding. It takes years to build a programming language from scratch, so you need a lot of runway. And it takes a specialized group of developers so they cost a lot of money to hire. The combination of the two means you need a lot of money to get a PL off the ground. Millions of dollars. The most likely way to get that kind of money right now is going through VCs, and they aren't going to give you anything for a safer systems language or a JavaScript transpiler. They want to be pitched a world-changing language that will redefine the computing landscape as we know it, and bring billions of people into the programming world. You might notice that as a common denominator among some of the languages I listed above. But this is a research problem with an uncertain time horizon and unknown feasibility. It could take a decade more to complete such a task, but it's very unlikely you're going to get a decade worth of funding from VCs. You'll probably get 3-5 years, and at the end of that you'll need to have something tangible that can get you follow-on funding to continue your work. But that means your original pitch of revolutionizing the computing landscape by democratizing programming gets downgraded to making an incremental change that increases some productivity for developers. Anyway, there are ways to get around this, but it likely means your company won't be a "startup" in the HN VC-funded sense. See Unison which is developed under public benefit corp. Andrew Kelley has managed to bootstrap Zig using user support and now corporate sponsorship. Urbit had an ICO and sells digital real estate.

pbiggar 5y ago
Fyi, Dark isn't hibernating. It's actively being worked on. See the repo: https://GitHub.com/Darklang/dark https://GitHub.com/Darklang/dark