4 ms·

I vaguely remember a talk given by the creator of ELM called "The Economics of Programming Languages". It's actually really expensive to make a good programmin

I vaguely remember a talk given by the creator of ELM called "The Economics of Programming Languages". It's actually really expensive to make a good programming language that's widely used. Forget about syntax or semantics or unique features or whatever. Having money and resources are the most important factor for a successful language.

zahlman 1y ago
Where does the money get spent? Just developer salaries and marketing?
- colejohnson66 1y ago
  Yes. Writing a language in your free time means juggling work on the side. Or you can be at Google and get paid to write Go for your job, and get free marketing from it. Even Rust had the backing of Mozilla. Until your "pet" language reaches critical mass that you can sustain yourself and quit your day job, you're fighting the giants.
- steveklabnik 1y ago
  Salaries, hosting bills, CI bills… most languages do not have a significant marketing budget.
- 3eb7988a1663 1y ago
  The volume of work required to get a language going practically requires full-time headcount. Language design/compiler, community website, documentation, CI, libraries (json, datetime, regex, database connectors, web server, etc), treesitter IDE plugins. A lot of different required hats. Sure, you can scrape by with a rag tag group of volunteers, but to ever get to mass adoption requires a lot of work and dedicated resourcing. Zig has been in development for how long now, and that is with the designer now working on it full time.
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
Oh boy, I always had this knack for seeing/testing multiple langauges and when I had first discovered nim, I used to watch some nim youtube related content and I remember someone in nim community pointed out about this same video from the creator of elm that you also mention. So, I think that I had watched the video and honestly, I will watch it now once again since I don't remember it clearly but If I remember, I really liked it. A quick search points me to the video, though I am not sure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8

zahlman 1y ago

Where does the money get spent? Just developer salaries and marketing?

colejohnson66 1y ago
Yes. Writing a language in your free time means juggling work on the side. Or you can be at Google and get paid to write Go for your job, and get free marketing from it. Even Rust had the backing of Mozilla. Until your "pet" language reaches critical mass that you can sustain yourself and quit your day job, you're fighting the giants.
steveklabnik 1y ago
Salaries, hosting bills, CI bills… most languages do not have a significant marketing budget.
3eb7988a1663 1y ago
The volume of work required to get a language going practically requires full-time headcount. Language design/compiler, community website, documentation, CI, libraries (json, datetime, regex, database connectors, web server, etc), treesitter IDE plugins. A lot of different required hats. Sure, you can scrape by with a rag tag group of volunteers, but to ever get to mass adoption requires a lot of work and dedicated resourcing. Zig has been in development for how long now, and that is with the designer now working on it full time.

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago

Oh boy, I always had this knack for seeing/testing multiple langauges and when I had first discovered nim, I used to watch some nim youtube related content and I remember someone in nim community pointed out about this same video from the creator of elm that you also mention. So, I think that I had watched the video and honestly, I will watch it now once again since I don't remember it clearly but If I remember, I really liked it. A quick search points me to the video, though I am not sure https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8