Anyone have any bright ideas as to how we can change these economics? Zig foundation is interesting.
I've watched Elm for many years from a distance, and I think that with a little more "social skills", Evan could've probably done the same as Elm had quite a lot of hype a few years ago... notice that even though Andrew may be a bit more charismatic (though I find Evan really nice too) he also has a bit of a hardline regarding features, specially requests by sponsors are not treated specially in any way - there's a talk from an Uber employee where he mention that after getting Uber to sponsor Zig, they asked about some issues they'd created and were told very, very clearly that sponsorships don't come with "perks" like having your issues given priority!
I'm not saying there needs to be only one programming language out there, but I get overwhelmed at the fragmentation. I am someone who programs to get things done not to sit back in awe at the beauty of programming languages, and there have been small projects that I have wanted to do that were impossible because my dependencies were spread across different languages (some of which I was not familiar with).
You want to benefit off the work of others, and bear zero cost. What if you just built those libraries yourself, or paid someone else to do it for you?
And on language creation and development, why should we stop exploring, discovering and innovating? To make you more productive? What a joke.
No one can do that to any large scale. That is all there is to say about that.
And all my projects are open source. I give back to the community and to science (see below).
> To make you more productive?
There's intent, and then there's reality.
I work in scientific programming, and scientists are absolutely struggling with software development. Not programming, but everything related to package management, version control, distribution, different languages, incompatible ecosystems, etc.
There is complexity in the boundaries of packages, languages, and ecosystems. That is unsolved and no one seems to care about it as long as you can do this cool things with your own language.
Someone's intent could be to make python package management easier. The reality is that having only a few people adopt that can make the entire community suffer.
I know a lot of people like Java but Java is exactly that.
We have Turing's Universal Machine, we have transistors. Science and capitalism have delivered technology and wealth. We won history.
The obvious thing to do is apply our technology and resources to provide a basic level of quality of life to everyone (i.e. knockout the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy.) Build a simple and efficient regenerative machine to provide food, shelter, clothing, some medicines, building material, etc. It would look like a neighborhood.
Then people like Evan Czaplicki could just do whatever they wanted to without having to worry about making money. Also everybody else.
We do this because: A) We can. B) Not to do so is cruel.
corollary: if no killer app, not killer language