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Why do they keep making new languages
(lemmy.stonansh.org)
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The same reason anyone creates a new product in an existing market - they want money.
For which language do you have to pay the language inventor to use it?
Coldfusion (Adobe) comes to mind. There is an open source CFML clone or two, but the real deal is a bit pricey. It's mostly used by government, higher ed., and healthcare. It's not terrible, but it was cooler when it was younger IMO.
If you invent a language and it takes off, you’re literally the expert on it and will reap the financial windfall of that.
That sentence seems correct. As for your question, you'd rather have to ask yourself: When would you pay for a programming language?
Back in the old days before internet and commodity hardware, before easy distribution, before non-trivial software, before basic compiler knowledge was common people were easily impressed, so naturally you could sell your compiler for primitive grug BASIC.
Today, that situation is different. A language by itself is meaningless, a risk, even, in some ways. A while back some developer of REM Objects was bitching about in the old aggregator on how nobody wanted to spend money on their special proprietary BASIC. Like it was just another product. They don't know ~~how to use a computer~~ how programming languages work. This extends to even finding users willing to use your stuff for free. I don't want to knock on REM Objects in particular, you know you could add way more examples like Seed7, every lisper ever etc., but let's get into why people pay for programming languages.
I'll bite the bullet: I'm making my own scripting language for fun, as a learning experience and a tool for my own projects. If it can help others, great! But that's not my main goal.
In nearly 5 years working on it, I've made at most 400$ from donations and grants. Open source isn't a viable source of income, no matter what ; and programming language dev is even less profitable.