[_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.