The Economics of Programming Languages [video]

I think this has led to many modern open innovations only realistically being useful for solving the problems of very large companies.

On a cynical day I might even accuse certain tools of being designed that way for job security. Or at least it looks that way because the majority of people who are using the tool could only dream of getting approval from management to make a better alternative.

The priorities of many of the tool maintainers, no matter how honest, just don’t match like they used to, and this is in an ecosystem awash with telemetry.

It's a combination of economics (who pays for the work? It could be people scratching an itch, but these people also have to have the privilege of being able to pay their bills somehow), difficulty (it's not a trivial problem space, you need to turn your compiler into one that understands not only its own language but also every potential language people try, and the errors might crop up in unexpected places where the context you need to provide good errors is long gone, so you must change the compiler to a bowl of spaghetti design, so you can access, for example, the type checker during parsing) and inertia (developers are used to building tools for themselves, so they dont spend time on diagnostics because they are already familiar with the inner workings od the tool, then other developers use those tools and because every other tool is like that they don't expect good errors, so no one considers them important enough, and the cycle goes on and on).

But let me be clear on one thing: although there are many things in your language design and compiler implementation that you can do to make things easier on yourself (don't throw anything away related to the causal relationship for why a certain constraint is present!), the work is mostly elbow grease, and spit and polish, little more.

LLVM is one. That's pretty successful.

The JVM is another. That's very successful, there are lots of languages that build on the JVM to reduce their tooling costs. Java, Kotlin and Clojure are examples of that.

GraalVM is another. If you use their Truffle framework then you get JIT compilation, debugging, tracing, instrumentation, different kinds of interpreters, advanced strings, some LSP support, language interop and FFIs and more.

But what you see, generally, language authors tend to start by hacking together a compiler and standard library starting from a C hello world program. Not that many survey the landscape and look for ways to reduce the costs.

I think I get the Clojure guy now.

I get the point you're trying to make here, and I agree that funding from big corporations has fundamentally distorted the open-source landscape in ways that might not be the most desirable, but we can acknowledge that without invalidating people who believe that the Elm project has been mismanaged by just assigning them to some "those kinds of people" bin.

Or as I like to point out, living as street artist.

Sure one does get some money out of it, yet on its own its isn't going to pay all the bills.

This means the code might be tackling problems that small companies don't have, though. It might be more complicated than you need.

Maybe it's bleak if you care about control issues (governance) or you want to make money off open source? But as a source of free, possibly useful stuff, it's pretty good.

Also, the ads codebase is enormous, so there are plenty of technical challenges from getting language infrastructure to scale to their needs. (Consider getting a language server for an IDE to scale up as a codebase grows, or making the language tools generate efficient JavaScript that's not unreasonably slow to download, or loading and displaying large tables in the browser.)

I have no idea whether Flutter generates revenue directly. I'd guess not, but internal usage of Flutter is likely enough to justify having a team devoted to maintaining and improving it.

Tools people complain about And tools nobody use.

More demand. As you’ve stated, we probably just wouldn’t have services like Google Docs if we were still writing code in Fortran. But with the advent of better languages and tooling, people replace old tasks (e.g. spreadsheets copywriting) with automation, and create new types of software (video games, social media, ads). Software engineers have become more efficient but there’s a need for more software engineers, because there’s a need for much more programming.

It’s the same reason people still work a lot despite having more and more automation: our expectations for a decent quality of life (housing, shopping choices, machines) have increased. Workers have become more efficient but there is much more work to be done.

A lot of it is inefficiently too. I believe there are a lot of “bullshit tech jobs” (see: ad creators), and software produced with real money which really just isn’t necessary. Similarly, there are bullshit jobs in other fields (see: call centers); things like huge houses and shopping choices which aren’t necessary, and there’s a lot of waste (food, old stuff, products designed to fail), which all cause society as a whole to work much more than we really need to.

But it’s not just inefficiency. There are a lot of problems we simply couldn’t tackle with old technology (be it software, hardware, chemical manufacturing, healthcare) which we can tackle now. So, better tools don’t reduce jobs, they just change how the jobs are done and what they’re for.

It seemed like a good idea worth exploring. I can see how he'd get Jeff'd there.

I've watched Elm for many years from a distance, and I think that with a little more "social skills", Evan could've probably done the same as Elm had quite a lot of hype a few years ago... notice that even though Andrew may be a bit more charismatic (though I find Evan really nice too) he also has a bit of a hardline regarding features, specially requests by sponsors are not treated specially in any way - there's a talk from an Uber employee where he mention that after getting Uber to sponsor Zig, they asked about some issues they'd created and were told very, very clearly that sponsorships don't come with "perks" like having your issues given priority!

I'm not saying there needs to be only one programming language out there, but I get overwhelmed at the fragmentation. I am someone who programs to get things done not to sit back in awe at the beauty of programming languages, and there have been small projects that I have wanted to do that were impossible because my dependencies were spread across different languages (some of which I was not familiar with).

We have Turing's Universal Machine, we have transistors. Science and capitalism have delivered technology and wealth. We won history.

The obvious thing to do is apply our technology and resources to provide a basic level of quality of life to everyone (i.e. knockout the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy.) Build a simple and efficient regenerative machine to provide food, shelter, clothing, some medicines, building material, etc. It would look like a neighborhood.

Then people like Evan Czaplicki could just do whatever they wanted to without having to worry about making money. Also everybody else.

We do this because: A) We can. B) Not to do so is cruel.

corollary: if no killer app, not killer language

Your choice of examples also dates you as being roughly 20 years older than Evan. ;)

How do you sell people on enrolling for a course that uses a language that isn't used by any other company, which makes it pretty useless outside of possibly teaching some high level concepts?