

Making money from programming language design - gdp
http://www.plsadventures.com/2009/08/making-money-from-programming-language.html

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alaricsp
This issue is dear to my heart, too, as a hobbyist programming language
designer myself ;-)

I've never seen it as a route to income in itself - but it can do so
indirectly. My project, ARGON (<http://www.argon.org.uk/>) is all about
reinventing the platform we build software on - OS, programming language,
libraries, file system, network protocol - purely because the current
technologies we use are hampered by backward compatibility and poorly
integrated; I think it'd be a good thing for the world to start again from
scratch (and deal with compatibility at a higher level).

So I've thought more about how I might possibly make my hobby pay for itself.
I think that an entire platform might well be successful as an embedded
platform, as there's much less motivation for compatibility and a familiar
programming environment in that market. In the workstation and server worlds,
however, I think such a platform pretty much has to be open source, or it'll
never be adopted by hackers who want something to play with. Then the usual
open-source tricks will apply: selling boxed sets with manuals and 'enterprise
tools' in, support contracts, commercial redistribution licenses, etc.

Getting rich by writing a book and general fame/glory leading to speaking
engagements, however, is right out ;-)

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stonemetal
MS's compilers have always been free(As far back as I can remember which would
be VC6 where only the non optimizing compiler was free.) They charged for the
IDE, and the optimizer. With the switch to .Net the optimizing compiler became
free, and then a release or two latter a basic version of the IDE was released
for free as well.

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gdp
Thanks for that. So there is a commercial version of the IDE that basically
has more features?

~~~
stonemetal
The free edition is just the base IDE(code editor, debugger, gui designer).
Come on this is MS, there are 5 versions of the pay IDE. Things you need to
pay for:

using more than one language(you can download multiple free versions but that
means having multiple installs of VS laying around),

3rd party plugins,

profiler,

code test coverage tool,

static analysis tool,

Database tools,

Integration with their team foundation server(source control, bug tracker,
project management stuff )

