3 ms·

Since when do language designers get rich? I can't think of a single person who got rich through language design.

• dalke 14y ago
  According to Borland's 1997 lawsuit against Microsoft, Anders Hejlsberg had a signing bonus of $1 million plus stock options to move to Microsoft. That sounds like a rich language designer. I think of language design like running. Almost everyone can run, a lot of people run because they enjoy it, some of those enter competitions, but mostly because they enjoy the social and competitive aspects. Very few people make a living by running, and almost no one gets rich as a professional runner. A lot of people enjoy making new languages. Some of these languages are used by more than a handful of people, though most of those are domain-specific languages. Only a few languages enter wide-spread use, and of those language designers, very few get rich from that work.
• bjoyx 14y ago
  Stephen Wolfram
  • mturmon 14y ago
    Nice. Add Cleve Moler and Jack Dangermond, I suppose.
  • 4ad 14y ago
    Mathematica is much more than a language. People buy Mathematica for system, the language is just a small part of it. (And it's crap, just like MATLAB language is crap, but the full product itself is massively useful).