3 ms·

Anyone have any bright ideas as to how we can change these economics? Zig foundation is interesting.

brabel 3y ago
Zig is a really interesting case... it seems Andrew Kelly has been able to get from a small Patreon donation model to support his own modest salary, to a Foundation that is sponsored by several big names and has enough funds to pay several people to work on Zig full time. I've watched Elm for many years from a distance, and I think that with a little more "social skills", Evan could've probably done the same as Elm had quite a lot of hype a few years ago... notice that even though Andrew may be a bit more charismatic (though I find Evan really nice too) he also has a bit of a hardline regarding features, specially requests by sponsors are not treated specially in any way - there's a talk from an Uber employee where he mention that after getting Uber to sponsor Zig, they asked about some issues they'd created and were told very, very clearly that sponsorships don't come with "perks" like having your issues given priority!
- foobiekr 3y ago
  That’s wrong though. Sponsorships that do come with perks low negotiating a mutually beneficial position. A valid take would have been to work out some kind of NRE scheme or contracting scheme.
  - 3836293648 3y ago
    Then that's in the sponsorship agreement. You can't just sponsor someone and then expect more than you put in the agreement.
- truculent 3y ago
  I think a key factor is that Evan seems to think about the (very) long term. With that in mind, relying on one person's sustained willpower and charisma probably isn't attractive.
sseagull 3y ago
I'll be kinda honest here, but one thing that pops into my head is to stop developing so many new languages and workflows. It's hard to build any sort of critical mass (paying or not) around hundreds or thousands of tiny communities. I'm not saying there needs to be only one programming language out there, but I get overwhelmed at the fragmentation. I am someone who programs to get things done not to sit back in awe at the beauty of programming languages, and there have been small projects that I have wanted to do that were impossible because my dependencies were spread across different languages (some of which I was not familiar with).
- dfee 3y ago
  Not an interesting take. You want to benefit off the work of others, and bear zero cost. What if you just built those libraries yourself, or paid someone else to do it for you? And on language creation and development, why should we stop exploring, discovering and innovating? To make you more productive? What a joke.
  - sseagull 3y ago
    > You want to benefit off the work of others, and bear zero cost. What if you just built those libraries yourself No one can do that to any large scale. That is all there is to say about that. And all my projects are open source. I give back to the community and to science (see below). > To make you more productive? There's intent, and then there's reality. I work in scientific programming, and scientists are absolutely struggling with software development. Not programming, but everything related to package management, version control, distribution, different languages, incompatible ecosystems, etc. There is complexity in the boundaries of packages, languages, and ecosystems. That is unsolved and no one seems to care about it as long as you can do this cool things with your own language. Someone's intent could be to make python package management easier. The reality is that having only a few people adopt that can make the entire community suffer.
- foobiekr 3y ago
  You’re getting downvoted but I agree with this. Fragmentation tends to become a pathological situation where the ecosystem ends up consisting of mostly promising but half baked solutions and h th is gets dominated by big, boring, awful but corporate financed solutions. I know a lot of people like Java but Java is exactly that.
dustingetz 3y ago
build a killer app (web browser) build scripting language into app (javascript) corollary: if no killer app, not killer language
carapace 3y ago
If I may stand on your soapbox for a moment, changing economics is the whole point of computers and software. We have Turing's Universal Machine, we have transistors. Science and capitalism have delivered technology and wealth. We won history. The obvious thing to do is apply our technology and resources to provide a basic level of quality of life to everyone (i.e. knockout the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy.) Build a simple and efficient regenerative machine to provide food, shelter, clothing, some medicines, building material, etc. It would look like a neighborhood. Then people like Evan Czaplicki could just do whatever they wanted to without having to worry about making money. Also everybody else. We do this because: A) We can. B) Not to do so is cruel.

Zig is a really interesting case... it seems Andrew Kelly has been able to get from a small Patreon donation model to support his own modest salary, to a Foundation that is sponsored by several big names and has enough funds to pay several people to work on Zig full time. I've watched Elm for many years from a distance, and I think that with a little more "social skills", Evan could've probably done the same as Elm had quite a lot of hype a few years ago... notice that even though Andrew may be a bit more charismatic (though I find Evan really nice too) he also has a bit of a hardline regarding features, specially requests by sponsors are not treated specially in any way - there's a talk from an Uber employee where he mention that after getting Uber to sponsor Zig, they asked about some issues they'd created and were told very, very clearly that sponsorships don't come with "perks" like having your issues given priority!

foobiekr 3y ago
That’s wrong though. Sponsorships that do come with perks low negotiating a mutually beneficial position. A valid take would have been to work out some kind of NRE scheme or contracting scheme.
- 3836293648 3y ago
  Then that's in the sponsorship agreement. You can't just sponsor someone and then expect more than you put in the agreement.
truculent 3y ago
I think a key factor is that Evan seems to think about the (very) long term. With that in mind, relying on one person's sustained willpower and charisma probably isn't attractive.

sseagull 3y ago

I'll be kinda honest here, but one thing that pops into my head is to stop developing so many new languages and workflows. It's hard to build any sort of critical mass (paying or not) around hundreds or thousands of tiny communities. I'm not saying there needs to be only one programming language out there, but I get overwhelmed at the fragmentation. I am someone who programs to get things done not to sit back in awe at the beauty of programming languages, and there have been small projects that I have wanted to do that were impossible because my dependencies were spread across different languages (some of which I was not familiar with).

dfee 3y ago
Not an interesting take. You want to benefit off the work of others, and bear zero cost. What if you just built those libraries yourself, or paid someone else to do it for you? And on language creation and development, why should we stop exploring, discovering and innovating? To make you more productive? What a joke.
- sseagull 3y ago
  > You want to benefit off the work of others, and bear zero cost. What if you just built those libraries yourself No one can do that to any large scale. That is all there is to say about that. And all my projects are open source. I give back to the community and to science (see below). > To make you more productive? There's intent, and then there's reality. I work in scientific programming, and scientists are absolutely struggling with software development. Not programming, but everything related to package management, version control, distribution, different languages, incompatible ecosystems, etc. There is complexity in the boundaries of packages, languages, and ecosystems. That is unsolved and no one seems to care about it as long as you can do this cool things with your own language. Someone's intent could be to make python package management easier. The reality is that having only a few people adopt that can make the entire community suffer.
foobiekr 3y ago
You’re getting downvoted but I agree with this. Fragmentation tends to become a pathological situation where the ecosystem ends up consisting of mostly promising but half baked solutions and h th is gets dominated by big, boring, awful but corporate financed solutions. I know a lot of people like Java but Java is exactly that.

dustingetz 3y ago

build a killer app (web browser) build scripting language into app (javascript) corollary: if no killer app, not killer language

carapace 3y ago

If I may stand on your soapbox for a moment, changing economics is the whole point of computers and software. We have Turing's Universal Machine, we have transistors. Science and capitalism have delivered technology and wealth. We won history. The obvious thing to do is apply our technology and resources to provide a basic level of quality of life to everyone (i.e. knockout the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy.) Build a simple and efficient regenerative machine to provide food, shelter, clothing, some medicines, building material, etc. It would look like a neighborhood. Then people like Evan Czaplicki could just do whatever they wanted to without having to worry about making money. Also everybody else. We do this because: A) We can. B) Not to do so is cruel.