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Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

I envy the kind of confidence that would lead someone to decide that a new programming language is their ticket to riches.

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Sounds more as if he thinks a new programming language might possibly be able to let him eke out a living while doing work he enjoys. No riches in sight, so far as my reading of it is concerned.

That's a little mean. The author writes:

> 100% of donations I receive go towards paying rent, buying food, and generally attempting to live a modest, but healthy life.

He doesn't expect to get rich from this.

Even so, at some point if the language "takes off", a company out there may want to become a full-time sponsor. It's no riskier than a startup - and nicely bootstrapped with very low cost of maintaining it.

Kinda awesome actually he's doing what his passion is.

Also, who was the last person getting rich from a programming language?

Programming languages are more of an open-source thing. You can't make much money from them.

Anders Hejlsberg got $1M for joining Microsoft: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg

To get the principal engineer behind the languages Turbo Pascal, Object Pascal (Delphi) and then C# and TypeScript that seems like the deal of the century if you factor the business value of all of the above.

Indeed, and at the time I was surprised that they got him for so little. There's so many design decisions in C# that resemble Object Pascal and Turbo Pascal, that it's pretty obvious that Anders=C# (not to take anything away from what are surely some of the best compiler engineers in the last few decades, I just don't know their names off-hand).

As someone who programmed heavily in Delphi back in the day their absolutely are and it's one of the reasons I like C# so much, it feels like home.

So does TypeScript.

I also used all languages designed by Anders, his practical approach is clearly visible in all of them. Unfortunately there are just a few interviews with him but they are all high quality: https://www.artima.com/intv/anders.html

Which is hardly "getting rich" if you are as skilled as Anders Hejlsberg.

I’m pretty sure Anders’ salary at Microsoft qualifies him being called rich.

I think the GP assumed that Anders was already rich before that so joining Microsoft didn't 'get him rich'. But if that was the case, based on his work history he may have still 'gotten rich' via programming languages, just from before Microsoft.

I think GP is saying that $1M isn't enough money to "get rich", and furthermore isn't particularly "for creating a language", for someone who could easily make $200K-$1M working on whatever Microsoft wants.

But GP forgot that the $1M was in 1997, before Google and Facebook and friends made non-founder engineers rich.

Netscape?

By that standard, I would guess that Chris Lattner did OK when joining Tesla.

I have a feeling some of the people involved with kx systems probably did well out of it. https://kx.com/about-kx/

Open source can open many avenues of profit. I wonder what the creator of laravel makes with conferences, forge and paid support.

Not only does he probably have a good amount of savings, he can easily get a new job if this experiment fails. It’s a gutsy move I’d never be able to do but not really something he can’t recover from.

Yeah, as a former senior engineer with a well known company, who took time off to develop his own programming language all he has to do is throw his resume into the recruiter feeding frenzy and immediately get a job.

While it's admirable, I can't really say it's risky. Risky is quitting in a field where people stay laid off for like a year.

It IS risky unless he has a cushion to fall on (lots of saving or trust fund). Life tends to pull out expensive rabbits out of hats, more of them as one gets older.

At $1000/month, a broken or stolen laptop or bicycle is ~two months. In the US (which he is) Any medical issue, or a baby, is somewhere between three months and bankruptcy.

He's taking a sabbatical, not retiring permanently. Sure, he needs to have some money saved up.

Well, I assume he's going to be smart about it and have at least six months' income.

If he’s spending $2K on a bike then he’s not living a “modest” life.

Baloney. If your bicycle is a serious mode of transportation that's not unreasonable at all.

...to riches.

There are riches besides money.

Yes, but they end up being difficult to chase if you can't make rent or buy groceries.

There's a big bit in the middle between "homeless and starving" and "actually rich".

Of course there is, but my point is I could not do this without an expectation of penury.

He's probably not going to get rich off patreon donations. The only developers that are doing well on patreon are being sponsored by real companies (or making adult games).

For example vue.js has 100k github stars and the creator is still only getting 15k a month on patreon and a good chunk of that comes from only a small handful of $2000 tier company sponsors: https://graphtreon.com/creator/evanyou. So that's probably a rough upperbound on how much the donation model can support.

_Only_ 15k/month? Sounds like a pretty epic deal to me, getting paid a very healthy salary to set your own hours and work on your baby.

As someone who writes programming languages, let me tell you that people who do so don't do it to get rich. We do it because we see great inefficiency in the world of systems that needs to be corrected. It's like people who are social justice activists. They're not getting rich either, but they're doing what needs to be done.

Reminds me of the fellow that took a year off to create an amazing new version control system. He made svk, which was pretty good except for being followed too closely by git.

However good Zig looks, there's also Nim, ATS, Rust, and a dozen more. Seems like a good time for programming languages -- which means a dangerous time to quit your day job for one.

realistically, i doubt the author would have trouble finding another job if this doesn’t pan out.

I doubt that the svk guy had that problem either.

His problem was, instead, "I took a year off work to produce a VCS and then saw the throne taken by git. My work has been forgotten and nobody uses it--not even me."

That's the experience of 99.999% of all startups.

Thanks for clarifying, I see what you're saying

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