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by InvisibleCities 1792 days ago
Because programming languages are a public good, and public goods are fundamentally incompatible with a profit motive. A “programming language startup” would be like an “anti-poverty startup” or “social justice startup” - either an edifice doomed to fail because of its inherent contradictions, or a front for lies and grifting.
2 comments
samatman 1792 days ago
This premise can be trivially disproven with one citation, so I'll choose Clojure and Cognitect.

Ok, not fundamentally incompatible, right?

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lmeyerov 1792 days ago
Cognitect was a successful consulting services startup that didn't build a scalable software product/service, right?

I'm not sure why they would have sold if they ever figured out how to make a software part of the clojure ecosystem sustainable & growable revenue source, e.g., hosting.

In contrast, Julia's recent fundraise is on a successful science tool that happens to be written in Julie, and a hope that hosted Julie might one day pay the bills. But not proven yet. NPM & dockerhub showed repo hosting is tough to succeed on even with wide use, though Anaconda shows promise when mixed with consulting revenue.

Jean's article also toes around developers not always being the buyer, so requiring a model more like Twilio, where they are presales/marketing for some other customer. That kind of misalignment adds another level of pain.

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iLemming 1790 days ago
> Cognitect was a successful consulting services startup that didn't build a scalable software product/service, right?

I'm not sure what exactly you mean by that, Cognitect is a relatively small company (if I'm not mistaken, there are fewer than 20 engineers work there). And there are plenty of products built on Clojure ecosystem. It scales very well. Cisco, Apple, Walmart, etc., are all successfully built and keep expanding their [massive] Clojure code-bases.

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lmeyerov 1790 days ago
Didn't Cognitect primarily make money through consulting services revenue for other people's projects, and not selling Clojure / Clojure tools?

I think there was a product attempt by becoming a database company -- datomic -- that happened to be written in clojure, but ultimately they still got bought out for consulting vs product: https://www.cognitect.com/blog/2020/07/23/Cognitect-Joins-Nu...

So again, for all the good parts, just not the success story for a PL/tools startup that Jean is looking for..

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native_samples 1791 days ago
That's clearly not true because such companies existed in the past and were not "doomed to fail" nor fronts for lies and grifting. The most obvious example was Borland which dominated the 90s with their superior commercial compilers and programming languages, at least for anyone writing Windows apps which back then most people were.
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