Ask HN: List of people who successfully built for profit programming languages? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: List of people who successfully built for profit programming languages?

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What people do you know have started for profit programming languages and have been successful at it.

Here is a few I can think of.

- Arthur Whitney (K, Kdb+ & Shakiti)

- Micro APL (I don't know the owner)

- Dyalogue APL(I don't know the owner)

- Stephen Wolfram (Mathematica, Wolfram Language)

- MATLAB (I don't know the owner)

I would be happy to learn more about this industry and the people involved.

Please help me list interesting projects and people that concern this topic. Or Nudge me to resources that I may find interesting.

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"For profit" has many meanings. Most languages are invented to provide a certain kind of leverage that the author thinks is important in solving problems, and solving problems is usually financially profitable. How exactly that profit is achieved, by what business model, varies over time.

Four that are definitely worth learning about as their inventors and contexts are super interesting and a lot of material is available

Alan Kay, Smalltalk

Bjarne Stroustrup, C++

Brad Cox, Objective C

Rich Hickey, Clojure

I would add that JetBrains, the business, has been incredibly and for many very surprisingly successful at being a for profit programming tools company that now has invented their own language variant (Kotlin). Very interesting story.

What do you mean by "for-profit" in this context? Many were developed by individuals at work, and later became widely adopted. Presumably the inventor also got paid some, if not in outright cash, at least in reputation...?

Lua and Ruby come to mind. If you expand it a bit, Elixir, Java, Javascript, Python, Perl, and PHP all had mostly solo designers at first. (Of course eventually they'd become much bigger projects.)

I mean language that you have to explicitly pay money to use. Like the ones I listed above. You actually have to pay to use them

A lot made money by offering the language for free & setting up a consultancy firm. But that is not what I primarily mean.

I think it is hard to make a for profit general purpose language today; if you by that you mean that the developers directly pay for it. The business model has moved on; and builders for languages / platforms have found other ways of charging people.

- Anders Hejlsberg, original author of Turbo Pascal, chief architect of Delphi, creator of Visual J++, lead architect of C#, and core developer on TypeScript...just read his wikipedia page and your head will explode lol!

Sicstus Prolog

If dialects of BASIC count, you might consider Andy Gariepy et al (ZBasic/FutureBASIC), as well as Andrew Barry (CrossBasic, which became REALbasic).