"The Economics of Programming Languages" by Evan Czaplicki (Strange Loop 2023)

I don't know if it's because I've been spending a lot of my spare time over the past decade trying to solo develop my own programming language, or if I'm broken inside, but instead of finding this talk funny I found it rather sad. Although, one strange thought I had regarding what he said about the time to develop a language, is that if we're talking about an attempt at making something big and complex that many people will find useful then of course it'll take longer than a year, and especially if you're working alone, but if we're talking about a DSL or something that people will use for configuration junk, then you can do it in a relatively short period of time. Way back when I started programming I wrote my own BASIC dialect, and it wasn't quite like most others because I kept diverging from what the core of such languages usually try to be but it was still mostly simple with a decent enough REPL. That project only took me a few months. Where things get hard is when you try to do complex things and over-complicate them. In other words, we do it to ourselves. I only hope that when I finally release my language to the world that it gets used by at least twice as many as it's used by now.

AGPL?

That google revenue reminds me how much I would like to use Yacy for searching.

When you look at Firefox revenue, keep in mind that the company that makes matlab has higher revenue.

The internet landlord idea matches pretty well what Cory Doctorow is writing.

There should be no landlords in the internet. But developers should still get paid. And those paying them must get their money from somewhere.

What a fascinating and slightly tragic talk

Would be interesting to extend this to frameworks and libraries like React. As a web developer I don’t have much choice in what language to use but there are big companies and economic interests behind these libraries that honestly I haven’t given much thought to until I saw this talk.

Methinks I like this talk

fantastic talk

There are a few languages other than the mathematics/academic oriented ones that use the usage license model. They're kind of obscure though and really the usage isn't for the "language" but for the compiler/interpreter. K is one that comes to mind. There are a few Lisp compilers that also use this model. And a number of the old school business languages like FORTRAN and COBOL have compilers like this too.

I recommend reading the book "Start Small, Stay Small" - it's been some 12 years since I read it, but it very much talks about getting Jeff'd - and about avoiding it by abandoning the dream of creating mainstream products with million dollar potential. Find a niche that is financially viable for you, but isn't viable for Jeffrey.

Anyway, excellent talk. Went from "why am I watching a talk about languages in my spare time" to "I'm going to recommend this to everyone IT adjacent" really fast.

Í understand. I am a salesforce (cloud only) consultant. I did something no other consultant (I know of) can do. I can make salesforce code (apex) run locally. And I don't know what to do with that (kind of). Dont want to get Jeffd.

amazing talk lol

No, the term "open source" did not come from Mozilla. The Mozilla release actually happened before "open source" achieved currency, more or less concurrently with me and a few other people deciding that "free software" needed to be rebranded in order to go mainstream. The rebranding took place in the year following the Mozilla release and got applied to Mozilla retrospectively.

This is the exact problem I’ve been thinking about for a long time now. I have a project that I want to make my “the” project. Build it, plant it, socialize it, inspire someone, give my thoughts a life and watch it grow a forest. But I simply don’t know where to start. Everything and everyone is a propaganda. Do I just choose the lesser of the two evils and start?

Would having a "cooperative" contributor license solve this? A project is open source, might seem very interesting to some, but they don't know if their work will ever get recognized. If your project would use a "cooperative license" then the project success would be shared with all the contributors relative to their inputs (merged PRs let's say).

"you would jeff me"??!

Evan I appreciate you, and I hope oneday we escape the consistent ugly reality of creators and builders getting Jeff'd. there are ways, but they're still in their infancy more than a decade after their first big adoption wave.

Beautiful.

So what about Java? I was waiting for it to be mentioned but never got to see the category for it...

This is excellent. Thank you so much. It seems that there may be a relationship between Conway's Law and the points you make in the presentation. It seems that patronage is the way out if we can get individual developers to contribute both time and money to some sort of "Code Co-Op".

it is the best talk for me,
so valuable, so deep, so generous.

dBASE II was developed in the old days by Wayne Ratliff to help him win the office football pool. A really effective DATA-CENTRIC language and turned super-successful in its heyday. I find it odd that most people use MEMORY-CENTRIC languages today for database project. Definitely under-optimal. I wish it would come back to DATA-CENTRIC again.

soooo funny and insightful

Would love to see a conversation on this btwn him and andrew kelley of zig

i haven't tried Elm, but i've fallen in love with other development tools that were made by one person.

i don't have a tech job, so i don't have a lot of money. but if a tool i love is made by one struggling person, i'm happy to pay a slight premium to help them to keep working on it.

if an Elm hosting service meets my needs, is easier than AWS, costs like 10% more than AWS, and *supports a project i like*, i will happily pay a bit more for it. a sentence like "you can host anywhere, but you can support me by using Elm Host" is enough to convince me.

(anecdotally i wanted to play with Elm but hosting seems complicated so i didn't bother.)

Loved the slides and the information flow.

very neat talk. much appreciated

One example of donations that comes to mind is GDScript, it's technically a part of a game engine and not really usable outside of it, but it's still an original python-like language developed purely on donations to Godot.

Incredible, thanks!

This doesn't apply just to languages, is about any piece of software you want to build and hopefully sell. Very interesting, insightful and fun.

Good stuff

I like his sense of humor. Interesting talk.

Someone give this guy $400m

not for nothing: everyone should learn the ideas in Capital by Karl Marx. programmers aren't immune whatsoever to politics, and almost all of the effort we're currently spending on this discipline is being wasted by capitalism. we're spinning our tyres and we're beholden to politics to fix this. i wish i could bury my head in the sand but it doesn't work.

I'm big Elm fan, it's very cool language and exploring it I got much better in multiple other areas. I really think there is too much overthinking about being Jeffed here, when you touched about consulting you mention reputation plays a role, the same goes about hosting, people would just use author's service if it's half decent just to support the language and author, this is something that can't be Jeffed from you Even.

Unison could be an example of "Hosting" language

Miguel de Icaza sold his Mono C# runtime to Microsoft so he found a way to make money with his runtime. (Though he added to it cross platform app development in C# for IOS and Android and this is probably where the money was, Not in the runtime directly but in everything around it).

This talk is based af. There's so many factors that I hadn't realised before. Respect for speaking on such a complex topic so candidly.

Ideally, every time a financial transaction occurs on the internet, a portion of the revenue should automatically go to the open source projects that the transaction depends on.

You forgot some of the most popular programming languages in your categorization - C, C++ and Java.

Can someone define hosting?

By "hosting" does he mean maintaining build servers and VM servers for people to use? Like being a cloud hosting provider devoted to a specific programming language?

Landlords are everywhere you look. You start seeing them everywhere. You buy a toaster and then it's yours, but I know you have all kinds of stuff that you pay for that isn't really yours because everyone does.