[nadam]

My general feeling is that there is a business-model problem in the tech industry. The most important technolgies are underfunded. They are created by smart people in their free time, or by companies who do not have enough money. For example I've looked at Scala's Eclipse plugin: it was a horror. It is just question of money (hiring a bunch of good developers) to create IDE support which is not totally buggy and not horribly slow.

If 1/100th of the VC money going into social startups would go into actual technology companies, if it were an accpeted business model to sell (maybe read-only open source) technology for money, then the tech landscape would be totally different.

TL;DR: to replace Java, a lot of directed professional development effort would be needed: money would help a lot.

[_delirium]

If you compare to where the previous generation of solid PLs and infrastructure research/development came from, I think what's missing currently is well-funded industrial research labs where such developers used to be able to park themselves while still releasing their languages/compilers for free, sidestepping the business-model question.

Not all languages came that way, but some of the major ones did: C was Bell Labs, C++ was also Bell Labs, Smalltalk was Xerox PARC. The main contemporary example in that vein is probably Go coming out of Google, though it remains to be seen how mature and widely used it'll get. For compiler projects, V8 coming out of Google and LLVM now being funded by Apple are two examples. Java is an example developed by a company with an eye towards product/monetization rather than as a research project, but is probably these days seen as a cautionary tale of why not to approach PLs as a business opportunity, because Sun pretty convincingly failed to monetize it.

[jules]

Microsoft works that way with C#, VB and F#. And they even fund Haskell research. Judging by the quality of their output, it seems to be working very well.

[_delirium]

True, those are also good examples, though with the non-Haskell examples it's a bit closer to the Eiffel model, where a company develops a high-quality proprietary compiler/environment to sell.

[nickik]

The market has in big parts shown that the kind of development we have know wins out. Sure there are some people left who can make money developing languages but most that did this died.

[sreque]

From my understanding, Sun's Java division was actually profitable. However, their Java division was a very small part of the overall company, and it was their hardware divisions that tanked.

[briansfrank]

One problem with infrastructure technology (programming languages, databases, IDEs, etc) is that all of the above is expected to be available for free by developers. So there is little incentive to develop a business around infrastructure technology. Sure people still do it, but not like the 80s when people still paid for PLs, IDEs, databases,etc. These markets have been drastically devalued by open source.

[heathkit]

The problem isn't that developers "expect" this stuff to be free. It's that the quality of a particular development platform is related to how many people are using it - how many tutorials are there out there, how much sample code, how many libraries, etc.

There may be some social bias against paying for stuff, I think partially because people got burned with vendor lock-in. Technology changes so quickly, it's hard to know what a tool is worth before the fact.

But there's also a very real economic reality at play here. The most valuable platforms will be the ones with the most people collaborating on them, and that's always going to be the free or open platforms.

As you move up the infrastructure chain, I think people are more willing to pay for useful libraries or services, especially for ancillary stuff. But what rational person would build their business on something they didn't own?

[modersky]

I agree about the former state of the Eclipse plugin; that's why Typesafe has spent considerable resources in changing that. I encourage you to give a try to the current release candidate of Scala IDE 2.0:

  http://www.scala-ide.org

[nadam]

Thanks, I will have look at it.

[soc88]

I pretty much like the Eclipse plugin. The IntelliJ one is still better, but the Eclipse one definitely gets its stuff done.

Sounds a bit like you used an old version ...

[justwrote]

For me, the eclipse plugin is crashing (or the whole IDE is freezing for a few seconds) too often when I try to get code completion. On the other hand, in IntelliJ the Scala plugin is pretty good! (Use the nightly builds!)