3 ms·

Personally I think you will be fighting an uphill battle, there are a lot of good free languages available and it is very hard to get adoption for a pay product

by kls 15y ago

Personally I think you will be fighting an uphill battle, there are a lot of good free languages available and it is very hard to get adoption for a pay product if it is general purpose. Now there are some industry specific and domain specific languages that companies pay for that deal with such things as avionics and other tightly controlled mission critical systems. That is really the last safe harbor for closed commercial languages that requires compensation to use. So to me, you are going to have to be light years ahead of everyone else if you are targeting general computing and even then you have an issue with adoption that you will have to deal with. Conversely if you are targeting a specific domain, then you will have to do due diligence on that domain and the offerings in that space and see if you can compete. Conversely you can still get paid if you decide to open source the language. A lot of organizations founded around the designers of open source languages are well compensated through other means, such as books, certifications and consultancy services. Being the authority on the language puts you in the unique position to capitalize on that authority.

eli_gottlieb 15y ago
The compiler is already open-source. Now, as to domain, the domain is systems programming. Competitors on equal level: HASP/Habit (whose lab I may well work in soon), Ada, D, Rust. Competitive advantages: state-of-the-art expressiveness, static checking and typefulness up the wazoo, applying research that most folks outside PL labs haven't heard of. I would say (to condescend unjustly to my esteemed colleagues) that Rust and Habit are the only efforts worth competing with in this space; the rest are just hackers playing around without much rigor. I am again thinking: "TypeSafe does it. Why shouldn't I be able to?"
- jetti 15y ago
  Here is the difference between what you want to do and what TypeSafe is doing: You want to create the language and then profit. TypeSafe takes an open source language and bundles it with other open source technology and then offers support. I think it would be hard to keep working on your language while trying to make a profit. If you want to try to make money, write a book about your language. Put it on http://leanpub.com/ http://leanpub.com/ and go from there. Maybe a publisher will be willing to work with you. But it is a way to earn money in the short term while you wait for the language to grow in popularity.
  - eli_gottlieb 15y ago
    I guess you could say the issue is that TypeSafe's seed funding came from academia. It's the same people in TypeSafe who developed Scala, but they developed it as a research language before "exporting" back to the industrial world.

by kls 15y ago

eli_gottlieb 15y ago

The compiler is already open-source. Now, as to domain, the domain is systems programming. Competitors on equal level: HASP/Habit (whose lab I may well work in soon), Ada, D, Rust. Competitive advantages: state-of-the-art expressiveness, static checking and typefulness up the wazoo, applying research that most folks outside PL labs haven't heard of. I would say (to condescend unjustly to my esteemed colleagues) that Rust and Habit are the only efforts worth competing with in this space; the rest are just hackers playing around without much rigor. I am again thinking: "TypeSafe does it. Why shouldn't I be able to?"

jetti 15y ago
Here is the difference between what you want to do and what TypeSafe is doing: You want to create the language and then profit. TypeSafe takes an open source language and bundles it with other open source technology and then offers support. I think it would be hard to keep working on your language while trying to make a profit. If you want to try to make money, write a book about your language. Put it on http://leanpub.com/ http://leanpub.com/ and go from there. Maybe a publisher will be willing to work with you. But it is a way to earn money in the short term while you wait for the language to grow in popularity.
- eli_gottlieb 15y ago
  I guess you could say the issue is that TypeSafe's seed funding came from academia. It's the same people in TypeSafe who developed Scala, but they developed it as a research language before "exporting" back to the industrial world.