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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

The money quote imho is this:

> there is no money in infrastructure like programming languages. Very few people are willing to invest in such companies and the contenders these days are all Open Source without a decent funding model or backed by a large corpo (Oracle, Google, Microsoft) or both. [...] we're missing a business model where infrastructure people can get attention from VCs and a revenue model that somehow corresponds to the value they're bringing.

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>> there is no money in ... programming languages.

And yet there's Mathworks (MATLAB), Wolfram (Mathematica), SAS Institute, Kx Systems (q/kdb+), etc. Granted, these are all proprietary languages, but they aren't backed by the likes of Oracle or Google.

And I believe they're not VC funded either. They're all in for the long haul and can plan around slow growth.

When you get Matlab you are not just buying the language, you are also buying a lot of very advanced plugins and the IDE.

If not for the plugins and IDE why would you use Matlab instead of Octave?

I don't know if this is true for the other languages you mention, since I have no experience with them.

In my opinion, The value of programming "systems" like MATLAB lie in the fact that their primary customers are not really programmers but people like scientists and engineers who need to use computers and don't really want to (or have time to) learn new or better programming languages; These companies make their customers' lives easy by giving them easy to install and use, complete programming environments including a large set of domain-specific libraries.

including a large set of domain-specific libraries

Exactly.

And even with things like Octave, SciPy, they still outperform them in ease of use, turn-key solutions in a lot of areas.

I would add the very large old codebase in science. These systems gained popularity well before the advent of Python and other more user-friendly/approachable languages, so very large numbers of people in academia are familiar with them and have large volumes of code written for them.

As a grad student you're going to want to solve some problem, and your choice will be 1.) reimplement large segments of the lab's codebase in your language of choice or 2.) build something on top of the old code in Matlab.

I tried convincing my grad advisor to do things in python and not matlab, but no dice. He went with matlab for the problem he (and to as certain extent I) was trying to solve because of these kinds of institutional factors.

Or, to bring the examples back to something more people are likely familiar with here, Oracle (the DB), SAP,....

Maybe we can change that to: there is no money in general purpose programming languages?

And the key to that quote is:

"...we're missing a business model where infrastructure people can get [...] a revenue model that somehow corresponds to the value they're bringing."

It's a problem now and always has been, from the days when C++ suddenly got popular and C++ library vendors suddenly discovered they had to pay for real customer support and everyone realized per-use license fees were ridiculous.

A language is a good start, but you need to provide something on top of that, or built on that, to make money.

MathWorks: Matlab -> Simulink + other toolkits. Hickey: Clojure -> Datomic. Typesafe: Scala -> TS stack. Whitney: A+ -> kdb/q.

Clojure is an interesting model where you have the company Cognitect built around the language. You have the product arm with Datomic, the consulting arm creating client projects in clojure and finally paid clojure/datomic training. All three feed into each other while helping to improve the language ecosystem at the same time.

What would be revolutionary in infrastructure? What would make infrastructure an order of magnitude cheaper? Or infrastructure such a sexy cool product, everyone would want their own? What would be an infrastructure play that would make a VC drool?

Infrastructure in this context is a bit nebulous. I think something like dead simple self hosted email would qualify. Built into ones home router so they'd never have to think about it.

> something like dead simple self hosted email

That's not the infrastructure he means. An email server has to be coded in a language / runtime; who develops those pieces? That's what Maciej means by "infrastructure": the languages and runtimes everybody else then uses to build sexy products.

Agreed. And within that space, given 2 hours, I can probably come up with a list of 30-40 projects which could be done for budgets between $5k and $100k that would have meaningful impact on multiple organizations.

And yet, there is a major struggle to get this $5k-$100k to make those projects

What about Typesafe's business model? They have a funding model and were able to raise $17M.

If I understand it correctly they build on the JVM, so the "infrastructure work" Maciej mentions (building the actual JVM) has already been done before they come into play.

Yes, but it also funds Odersky's work on Scala and Akka.

They building infrastructure (lang, community, lib ecosystem, stack) on top of another infrastructure. I think that's ok.

Some of that is state money right? How much of it is VC?

From what I understand, it's all private, raised from Shasta Ventures, Greylock Partners, Juniper Networks and Francois Stieger.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typesafe_Inc.#Investors

Typesafe (from their web site) sells a packaged version of their "stack" (similar to RHEL), plus support, plus what looks like a proprietary management tool (ConductR, which I think is pretty new). Also training and consulting.

I feel that a good infrastructure by itself is hard to sell, but easy accessibility of the infrastructure and stuff built around it (for example the play framework in case of Typesafe) could be a good sell.

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