[thinkpad20]

> It's hard to pitch a greenfield project like Eve, because there's no real great way to quantify the benefits of a language before it's been fully realized.

Plenty of languages have been developed without major corporate backing (especially in the beginning). Off the top of my head, elm, elixir, Haskell, ML, ruby, python, coffeescript, purescript, Idris, Agda, pony and I’m sure many others were developed at least initially by hobbyists and/or academics.

I honestly don’t know a whole lot about Eve. Maybe it was too large in scope to be a side project or fully volunteer-driven. But, even if that’s the case, that’s one of the main things academia is for; perhaps Chris should go for a PhD instead of a startup. I’m sure there are plenty of schools which would give him ample time and resources to work on it for research.

[ModernMech]

Each of the languages you mention are very small deltas (relatively) from our current state of the art (some more than others). It's not hard to convince one of the benefits of such languages, because they are already anchored. e.g. X language is like Y but with Types. Or, W language is like Z but with pure functions. etc.

Eve was very different from any language in widespread adoption, to the point where using it didn't even feel like programming at times. Therefore, it was difficult to quantify the benefits to others (especially companies) who have not experienced them first hand. With Eve, we didn't even know the full scope of supposed benefits until we started actually using the system we imagined in our heads.