Programming Language Early Funding?
11Carl Feynman
3niplav
3J Thomas Moros
1Yaroslav Granowski
2rsaarelm
2mishka
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I work for a company that developed its own programming language and has been selling it for over twenty years for a great deal of money. For many of those twenty years, I worked in the group developing the language. Before working for my current employer, I participated in several language development efforts. I say this not in order to toot my own horn, but to indicate that what I say has some weight of experience behind it.
There is no way to get the funding you want. I am sorry to tell you this.
From a funder's point of view, there are several effects that make this a bad bet. First, the difference between reasonably up-to-date general-purpose languages does not seem to be that large. This is as measured by actual effectiveness of projects (manager view) as opposed to whether a language is fun to use (engineer view). So presumably a new language will not offer a large improvement. If your language meets a combination of needs not served by any existing language, that may be a way around this. Second, every person who invents a new programming language thinks it will be a marvelous advance over all existing languages. It's like how every parent thinks their baby is the cutest. Some of them are actually right, but since all of them think this, a funder has no way of telling which is which. Third, as you note above, it is hard to monetize a new language. This means that the capitalist startup system will not be helpful to you. Fourth, much of language design is a balancing of imponderables (simplicity vs power, garbage collection vs control, etc.) There's no way to measure these before funding the project, so no way to make confident predictions of whether a new language will be an advance. So the backing of a project is even more of a leap of faith than it usually is. (Some of this risk can be retired by releasing an interpreter and documentation before writing a compiler.)
It's lousy and it sucks. Sorry.
I think it is interesting that you think it is not very neglected. I assume you think that because languages like Rust, Kotlin, Go, Swift, and Zig have received various funding levels. Also, academic research is funding languages like Haskell, Scala, Lean, etc.
I suppose that is better than nothing. However, from my perspective, that is mostly funding the wrong things and even funding some of those languages inadequately. As I mentioned, Rust and Go show signs of being pushed to market too soon in ways that will be permanently harmful to the developers using them. Most of those languages aren't improving programming languages in any meaningful way. They are making very minor changes at the margin. Of the ones I listed, I would say only Rust and Scala have made any real advances in mainstream languages, and Scala is still mired in many problems because of the JVM ecosystem. On the other hand, the Go language has been heavily funded and pushed by Google and has set programming languages back significantly.
I would say there is almost no path to funding a language that is both meant for widespread general use and pushes languages forward. Many of the languages that have received funding did so by luck and were funded too late in the process and underfunded. There is no funding that actually seeks out good early-stage languages and funds them.
Also, many of those languages got funding by luck. Luck is not a funding plan.
Also, academic research is funding languages like Haskell, Scala, Lean, etc.
I don't know about others, but Lean was funded not by academics. It was funded by a private fund ConvergentResearch. They target somewhere between academics and VC. I know this because Lean is the closest analogy to my project, although with a different mission. I tried to apply, but they didn't reply. Maybe they will find your proposal more appealing.
Anyway, the emergence of such funds as ConvergentResearch and OpenPhilanthropy is a promising trend.
The dark age might have gotten darker recently. Everyone's scrabbling around trying to figure out what AI will mean for programming as a profession going forward, and AI mostly only boosts established languages it has large corpora of working code for.
I've been following the Rust project for the last decade and have been impressed at just how much peripheral scutwork contributes to making the language and ecosystem feel solid. This stuff is a huge undertaking. I'm not terribly excited any more about incremental improvement languages. They seem to be mostly a question of not making crippling foundational design errors (hello C++) and expending enormous engineering effort on tooling and libraries. What might be more interesting is something that targets a specific niche and does something very cool for exactly that niche (Inform 7, dhall), or languages that go for a shoot-for-the-moon paradigm shift like Unison or the "we need to make large programs writable in 100x smaller codebases" from Alan Kay's VPRI research team.
1a future garbage-collected language in the vein of Swift, Scala, C#, or Java, but better
Have you looked at Julia?
Julia does establish a very strong baseline, if one is OK with an "intermediate discipline between dynamic typing and static typing"[1].
(Julia is also a counter-example to some of your thoughts in the sense that they have managed to grow a strong startup around an open-source programming language and a vibrant community. But the starting point was indeed an academic collaboration; only when they had started to experience success they started to make it more commercial.)
In the world of statically typed languages, Rust does seem to establish a very strong baseline, but it has a different memory management discipline. It's difficult to say what is the best garbage-collected statically typed language these days. I don't mean to say that there is no room for another programming language, but one does need to consider a stronger set of baselines than Swift, Scala, C#, and Java. Funding-wise, Rust also does provide an interesting example. If one believes Wikipedia, "Software developer Graydon Hoare created Rust as a personal project while working at Mozilla Research in 2006. Mozilla officially sponsored the project in 2009." ↩︎
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