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by raganwald 6705 days ago
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?
1 comments
stener 6704 days ago
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.
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pg 6704 days ago
If that's what you mean by market, there's no market for any programming language.
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jules 6704 days ago
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?
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nostrademons 6704 days ago
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.

But for general-purpose languages, not so much.

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pg 6704 days ago
The only way I can think of would be to keep it secret and write applications in it.
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jules 6704 days ago
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.)
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marcus 6704 days ago
Assuming that a significant portion of your time in a software startup is spent programming, a language that makes you twice as productive means you can try twice as many ideas, or develop the same software and free half your time for finding capital or users, or shortening your time to market by 50%, wouldn't any of these be a significant advantage???
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stener 6704 days ago
Matlab is actually high-level language so it is possible to monetize computer language.
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marcus 6704 days ago
I just use Octave (open source implementation of Matlab)
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