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In my opinion and in this order: 1. Complete your language including typical libraries and have it ready for production use. Not just beta and certainly not an

In my opinion and in this order: 1. Complete your language including typical libraries and have it ready for production use. Not just beta and certainly not an alpha. There are just too many new languages around in this wave for even a beta to take hold. 2. Document your language well. W/O sufficient documentation people will quickly give up. 3. Ready to run/compile downloads for all supported platforms. No required "install this to compile" dependencies for Windows especially. 4. Portable "unpack and go" files for download. NO INSTALLERS. Should work from flash drive. 5. Script to temporarily enable any environment settings. 6. Online IDE or REPL of some sort so people can play with it w/o needing any download. 7. Forum for discussion and Q&A that includes topical RSS feeds. Very important for causal potential users. 8. Link to your language from Reddit, HN, etc. ;) Still difficult, but this will make it as easy as possible for anyone to try out your language on a whim.

eliah-lakhin 13y ago
Thank you very much for such detailed reply! If I understand you correctly all these points are about technical implementation mostly, but not the promotion. And they seems for me quite reasonable. But is it really enough to win? Recently I have published my another project: https://github.com/Eliah-Lakhin/papa-carlo https://github.com/Eliah-Lakhin/papa-carlo . This is related to PL development too. And I also have detailed documentations on dedicated website: http://lakhin.com/projects/papa-carlo/ http://lakhin.com/projects/papa-carlo/ . As well as intorucing blog post: http://lakhin.com/blog/15.11.2013-handy-incremental-parser/ http://lakhin.com/blog/15.11.2013-handy-incremental-parser/. And I of course tried to publish these links in various places including HN too. But unfortunately there were too few feedback. So this experience show me that having a good support of the product with Documentation etc is not enought. But maybe I should not project that experience to PL development?
- commentzorro 13y ago
  For a programming language the "technical implementation" is, by far, the most important piece. No language that I'm aware of has been able to "win" without being ready for production use when the market was ready for it. I don't think any amount of promotion is going to do your language any good unless it's ready for use when people see your promotion. And then, if it's ready for use and has a nice place in the market then I doubt you'll need much more promotion than what I've listed above and some success stories to show it works. Are you really saying that you want to take your language and market it to the top? That's just not going to happen unless your Microsoft, Apple, etc. Unfortunately, you likely don't control enough of a necessary piece of the infrastructure to force people into your language. Go down the TIOBE list and answer for yourself when each language was first developed, when it was production ready, when it caught on, and how much and what type of marketing was needed to put it in the top 50? I think you'll find promotion of the language itself was not very important to its success, but being ready for real use at the right time was. (Is your language ready for production use?)
txutxu 13y ago
If you aim to reach opensource developers (they are great components for a new language community) I could add to that nice list: 9) Mailing list 10) IRC channel With convenient support. But on a more abstract way... I think... just focus all your marketing in the stuff that makes your lang desirable, for users of currently available languages. From all the view points (technical, management, guarantees, etc).

eliah-lakhin 13y ago

Thank you very much for such detailed reply! If I understand you correctly all these points are about technical implementation mostly, but not the promotion. And they seems for me quite reasonable. But is it really enough to win? Recently I have published my another project: https://github.com/Eliah-Lakhin/papa-carlo https://github.com/Eliah-Lakhin/papa-carlo . This is related to PL development too. And I also have detailed documentations on dedicated website: http://lakhin.com/projects/papa-carlo/ http://lakhin.com/projects/papa-carlo/ . As well as intorucing blog post: http://lakhin.com/blog/15.11.2013-handy-incremental-parser/ http://lakhin.com/blog/15.11.2013-handy-incremental-parser/. And I of course tried to publish these links in various places including HN too. But unfortunately there were too few feedback. So this experience show me that having a good support of the product with Documentation etc is not enought. But maybe I should not project that experience to PL development?

commentzorro 13y ago
For a programming language the "technical implementation" is, by far, the most important piece. No language that I'm aware of has been able to "win" without being ready for production use when the market was ready for it. I don't think any amount of promotion is going to do your language any good unless it's ready for use when people see your promotion. And then, if it's ready for use and has a nice place in the market then I doubt you'll need much more promotion than what I've listed above and some success stories to show it works. Are you really saying that you want to take your language and market it to the top? That's just not going to happen unless your Microsoft, Apple, etc. Unfortunately, you likely don't control enough of a necessary piece of the infrastructure to force people into your language. Go down the TIOBE list and answer for yourself when each language was first developed, when it was production ready, when it caught on, and how much and what type of marketing was needed to put it in the top 50? I think you'll find promotion of the language itself was not very important to its success, but being ready for real use at the right time was. (Is your language ready for production use?)

txutxu 13y ago

If you aim to reach opensource developers (they are great components for a new language community) I could add to that nice list: 9) Mailing list 10) IRC channel With convenient support. But on a more abstract way... I think... just focus all your marketing in the stuff that makes your lang desirable, for users of currently available languages. From all the view points (technical, management, guarantees, etc).