Re: Java

[Dan Weinreb <address@hidden>]

   Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2001 11:53:20 -0500
   From: "Christopher Barber" <cbarber@curl.com>

   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 all true, but what's worse, it's really hard to make money even
if you do provide all that stuff.  One reason is that it's in the
interest of vendors to provide that stuff to developers cheap, in
order to get developers to produce software products that will run on
the vendor's platform.

An interesting paper with some good points on this topic:

http://www.kai.com/publications/compiler-economics/