DConf 2013 Closing Keynote: Quo Vadis by Andrei Alexandrescu

[Joakim]

On Wednesday, 26 June 2013 at 01:25:42 UTC, Bill Baxter wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 2:37 PM, Joakim <joakim at 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.