Ask HN: New programming languages – can they succeed without a big sponsor? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: New programming languages – can they succeed without a big sponsor?

5 pointsopen-source-ux9 comments

Is a corporate sponsor the only (or main) way of attracting developers to a new programming language? And does this put other languages (without a corporate benefactor) at a disadvantage?

The Go language benefits from Google's support and resources. Similarly, Rust grew from the support and resources of Mozilla. For example, both languages have had (or still have) dedicated staff writing documentation for the language. This is a luxury that other languages cannot fund.

How can other languages without a big corporate sponsor attract funding to help grow the language and build related libraries?

Examples of new-ish "underdog" languages (for want of a better term):

- Nim

- Crystal

- Zig (not yet at version 1.0)

And even lesser known languages e.g. Odin, Vale, V Lang etc.

I'd hate to think that only languages with the generous funding and support of a big corporate sponsor can thrive. Meanwhile, other languages face the uncertainty of funding. How can a language succeed without a big sponsor?

It'll be tough - programming languages have become the new 'Sport of Kings', with winners bankrolled and promoted by billionaires, tech giants, universities/colleges, government. _____

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Essential Open Source Software for Science https://chanzuckerberg.com/eoss/ _____

Python Software Foundation Sponsors https://www.python.org/psf/sponsors/ Visionary Sponsors Google Meta ______

Scratch Foundation Supporters https://www.scratchfoundation.org/supporters Founding Partners LEGO Foundation Siegel Family Endowment National Science Foundation Massachusetts Institute of Technology

We are especially grateful to our Founding Partners who supported us from the early days of Scratch, each providing at least $10,000,000 of cumulative support since the creation of Scratch, in various forms.

The following list is based on cumulative giving to Scratch (at both MIT and Scratch Foundation) from January 1, 2021, to June 30, 2022:

Scratch Cat Partners - $1,000,000+ Fastly* Google.org LEGO Foundation Siegel Family Endowment _____

Sponsors - MIT App Inventor https://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/sponsors.html Our work would not be possible without the support of the following funders: Centro Superior para la Enseanza Virtual (CSEV) Ford Motor Company Google Motorola Motorola Mobility Foundation Samsung Verizon Foundation _____

Java https://www.oracle.com/java/ Oracle Java is the #1 programming language and development platform. It reduces costs, shortens development timeframes, drives innovation, and improves application services. With millions of developers running more than 51 billion Java Virtual Machines worldwide, Java continues to be the development platform of choice for enterprises and developers.

If the language has a massive productivity edge over other languages, the language would effectively spawn their own large corporate sponsors, by ensuring companies that use the language make boatloads more money than their competitors.

That's what I think happened with Python, and with Ruby (on Rails), neither of which had particularly large corporate backing in their early days.

That's certainly not all of it though. F# is one of the most productive languages out there that basically gets ignored.

>How can other languages without a big corporate sponsor attract funding to help grow the language and build related libraries?

People will switch to new tools when they are roughly 2x better than their current way of getting something done. If you specialize in a niche and make better tool optimized for that niche, you might get all of the people interested in that niche. The internet reaches most of humanity now, so even the smallest niche can be enough to sustain interest.

Alternatively, you can bring a new approach to a problem, a better mousetrap. Since people are flooded with such claims, the best way to gain traction is to show the tool having successfully used on several non-trivial projects. You can then use a "these cool things were build using X" marketing strategy.

Neither of these requires corporate involvement, just persistence and authentically listening to feedback and learning from it.

Languages spread when there is an obvious advantage to using the language. Java, in the beginning, was obviously better because it was multi platform, free, was sort of object oriented, and had an interface to C (to connect to existing libraries). It was finally possible to write once, and run on windows, apple, Unix. I worked on a DARPA project, and we snapped up the first public release because we needed to support all three. This was about 1995.

The next winning language will implement correct programs. There will be a specification language (assertions, type invariants, API contracts), and an implementation language. In the middle, massive semantic checking tool.

"Easy to learn" is a red flag. Arguments about ; and {} are silly.

Java was heavily pushed by Sun Microsystems. I’m not sure if it was ever in the same boat as the languages mentioned in the OP.

Look at Julia. Excellent for numerical simulations, but struggles to reach adoption. Scientific calculations are performed in Python, a slow and verbose language that is inferior for this purpose.

Elixir is newer than Go and is backed by a company but not a big one. I think it's bigger than Crystal. No idea about the popularity of Nim and Zig.

Money makes the world go round.

It's possible to survive without it, but not as comfortably.

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