On Wednesday, 26 June 2013 at 01:25:42 UTC, Bill Baxter wrote:
On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 2:37 PM, Joakim <joa...@airpost.net>
wrote:
This talk prominently mentioned scaling to a million users and
being
professional: going commercial is the only way to get there.
IDEs are something you can have a freemium model for. Core
languages are
not these days. If you have to pay to get the optimized
version of the
language there are just too many other places to look that
don't charge.
You want the best version of the language to be in everyone's
hands... Hard to make much money selling things to developers.
I agree that there is a lot of competition for programming
languages. However, Visual Studio brought in $400 million in
extensions alone a couple years back:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2011/04/12/happy-1st-birthday-visual-studio-2010.aspx
Microsoft doesn't break out numbers for Visual Studio itself, but
it might be a billion+ dollars a year, not to mention all the
other commercial C++ compilers out there. If the aim is to
displace C++ and gain a million users, it is impossible to do so
without commercial implementations. All the languages that you
are thinking about that do no offer a single commercial
implementation- remember, even Perl and Python have commercial
options, eg ActiveState- have almost no usage compared to C++.
It is true that there are large companies like Apple or
Sun/Oracle that give away a lot of tooling for free, but D
doesn't have such corporate backing.
It is amazing how far D has gotten with no business model: money
certainly isn't everything. But it is probably impossible to get
to a million users or offer professionalism without commercial
implementations.
In any case, the fact that the D front-end is under the Artistic
license and most of the rest of the code is released under
similarly liberal licensing means that someone can do this on
their own, without any other permission from the community, and I
expect that if D is successful, someone will.
I'm simply suggesting that the original developers jump-start
that process by doing it themselves, in the hybrid form I've
suggested, rather than potentially getting cut out of the
decision-making process when somebody else does it.
