
Ask HN: How can new and upcoming programming languages survive and thrive? - open-source-ux
Many programming languages struggle with attracting contributors or with securing funding. How do these programming languages - without large benefactor support (or large name association) - survive or thrive?<p>For example, the recent release of version 1.0 of Nim put the language in the spotlight and piqued the interest of lots of developers who may not have known much about the language. Will the recent publicity swell the number of Nim users and their levels of funding? Only time will tell.<p>Some recent languages have associations with companies or organisations that have helped adoption of those languages as well giving those languages widespread visibility. Some examples: Go and Google, Rust and Mozilla, and to a lesser extent Julia and MIT.<p>But what about the myriad other languages out there without those big-name associations? Can they prosper without financial support or visibility in the field? What can be done to support new and upcoming languages that don&#x27;t have big name benefactors?
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aberdysh
I think it is a self-correcting mechanism: adopting a new language comes with
the substantial overhead of learning it, possibly rewriting existing code in
it, etc. So if the benefits of a language outweigh all the mentioned burdens,
then the users are willing to switch. Therefore, today the new language with
mass adoption ambitions must be significantly better (Julia comes to mind as
an example) compared to existing alternatives

