Re: Java

[Michael Vanier <address@hidden>]

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

Given all that you're saying, why isn't Curl (the language, not the IDEs
etc.) open source?  It looks like a very interesting language, but last
time I checked I couldn't use it because it doesn't run on Linux (though I
gather that an alpha version for Linux has just been released).  It's
really hard to attract developer talent to a closed source product, even a
free one, because of this syndrome:

1) I download the free implementation of the language.
2) I write a lot of cool code in the language.
3) The company goes out of business, or gets bought by another company.
4) The product is shelved.
5) The implementation I have breaks with the next OS upgrade.
6) I have to re-write my code in another language.

The only way I know to avoid this is to have a really big company like
Microsoft or Sun pushing the technology so (3) doesn't happen, or to open
source the language.

Mike