Agree- very small market for Arc. I know hundreds of people who can benefit from Viaweb, tens of people who can benefit from YC, no single person who will use Arc.
Agree. There is a world market for maybe five computers.
Ok, I am joking you may be right. But it is notoriously difficult to predict the market for programming languages. had you attended LL2 on [November 9, 2002](http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/01/where-were-you-on-saturd...), could you have predicted which of the languages discussed would be popular... five years later?
I dont know. Market for this kind of computer language vs eshop solution and funding is very small in comparison. Market means someone will pay for using Arc.
Is it for a programming language startup to make money if you have a superior language? Say you have a programing language that is to Lisp as Lisp was to Fortran, how (if at all) can you make money from it?
It's been tried, eg. Clean, Dylan, or Miranda. Results are not really encouraging, and the language often gets open-sourced after its owner realizes they can't make money off it. And those languages are really nice languages (Dylan is my favorite Lisp variant, and Clean and Miranda are in many ways friendlier versions of Haskell).
Companies tend to have much better luck if the language is attached to a product, either as a scripting language or as part of a RAD suite. Think of AutoCad/AutoLisp, Flash/ActionScript, or Visual Basic.
Do you think that the language you use matters much? i.e. if you have a language that makes you twice as productive as in Arc, would that be a big advantage or a small one? (compared to having money, a good idea or being smart, etc.)
Ok, I am joking you may be right. But it is notoriously difficult to predict the market for programming languages. had you attended LL2 on [November 9, 2002](http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/01/where-were-you-on-saturd...), could you have predicted which of the languages discussed would be popular... five years later?