[7thaccount]

Kdb+ seems really cool and I've learned it a little bit for fun along with APL. It would actually be pretty cool for a lot of uses in my industry too, but the price is just crazy. We can't pay like $100k/cpu or whatever it is that the financial banks pay. So they've basically ignored a HUGE amount of potential customers.

[coliveira]

They found a niche that can pay the price to have an innovative product. I believe they did the right thing, after all it is not a product trying to solve all problems in the world. Other people could learn from their techniques and do the same for other areas and languages.

[7thaccount]

Not quite where I was going. The product does seem to be good and there is demand for it in many industries I'd think, but instead of using discriminatory pricing and having people pay less that have a much lower ability to pay, they just ignore the segment entirely. Maybe they know what they're doing though. It's a shame I don't get to use it at work

[RodgerTheGreat]

Semiconductor manufacturers understand that giving free samples of their chips to hobbyists creates an environment that breeds future sales: if 1 out of the 1000 people they mailed samples uses their chip in the design for a commercial product, they come out ahead.

Proprietary programming languages that are inconvenient for hobbyists to obtain- any more friction than cloning a git repo or installing via a package manager- have stunted open-source ecosystems, and in turn limited opportunities for grass-roots adoption.