RE: Java

["Christopher Barber" <address@hidden>]

> > Yeah, making products for technologists, and being "driven by
> > technology", in the sense you mean, is definitely what we did at
> > Symbolics.  May it rest in peace.
>
> I agree that making cool programming languages is not a business model.

Yes, indeed.  This made me extremely reluctant to join Curl until I
understood that they are not really selling a language, cool or otherwise,
so much as a technology for developing interesting web-deployed content.
Companies will pay real money for technology that lets them accomplish their
business goals more efficiently.  The fact that a language is part of the
technology is a side issue.

I think what this boils down to is that you can't make much money either
inventing a new language or even selling compilers for existing languages
because people need much more than a language: they need a wide variety of
code libraries, good development tools, and good deployment tools.

> That's why I predict that open source is likely where we will get most
> of the languages of the future.

Languages for what purpose?  There is no question that most new languages
will be of the open-source variety, but I am not so sure that those
languages will dominate commercial programming.

- Christopher