
How to monetize a programming language? - alex_m
If my ambitious &quot;change the world&quot; mission is to create a programming language, how would I go about financing its development and profiting from its usage? All constructive ideas and musings welcome.
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nostrademons
Conventional wisdom these days is that it's impossible, and moreover, you
don't even have a chance of success unless you're backed by a large
corporation that can afford to blow several million on development.

Conventional wisdom could always be wrong - there's always a chance that the
environment could shift and up-end everything we know. But the last
programming languages designed by an individual to gain widespread acceptance
were PHP and Ruby in 1995, Python in 1991, and Perl in 1987, and in most cases
widespread success came only 15 years after invention. Other than that,
everything's been corporate: Swift (Apple), Rust (Mozilla), Go & Dart
(Google), Javascript (Netscape), Java (Sun), Objective-C (Sun and NeXT), C# &
Visual Basic (Microsoft), C & C++ (Bell Labs). You could argue that Scala
(Martin Odersky, 2004) and Clojure (Rich Hickey, 2007) might count, but I
wouldn't call them mainstream in the sense of "You can have a safe career
knowing only that language."

I think your best bet for building a programming language for a living is to
become independently wealthy by founding a startup, and then write the
programming language afterwards. Or alternatively, build a critical system for
a large big company so that you're super valuable and have a track record, and
then threaten to leave if you can't do your pet programming language project.

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CyberFonic
We live in a times when Apple open-sourced Swift and even IBM are keen to use
it now. Even for Apple the Swift language is not a revenue generator.

Only large corporations are willing to pay for compilers, etc but they want
oodles of training, support, consulting, etc. And ... you have to be a Big
Corp to be worthy of their business.

Perhaps, I'm tainted by conventional wisdom, but none of the languages
referenced by @notsrademons has made its creators rich. Sure, they have good
jobs and some get paid to speak at conferences and for consulting.

BUT ... you might be the one to break the mold. If your only motivation is to
make money, then don't bother. If you truly believe in your "change the world"
concept and you are prepared to hustle to see your vision succeed then Just Do
It ! GOOD LUCK !

