by ModernMech | 2025-11-15 07:37:32+00:00
I'll try to answer your questions best I can.

1. Yes, as long as there are new machines that need programming, new programming languages will be needed. Today's top languages were built for the machines of the 1970, 80s, and 90s. Tomorrow's languages will be built for machines of today and tomorrow. As Alan Kay put it, if you want to invent a new language, first invent the machine of the future and then build a language for it.

2. No, you cannot. First of all, PL devs are cats, it's very difficult collecting them without financial compensation. So if your plan is to post a language and hope that people will come help you, you'll likely be disappointed. The problem is that everyone else interested in building PLs has their own itch to scratch, and they're not going to scratch yours without some compensation.

You might think "Well I can just raise money to do this", and you would be wrong. First, it's very hard to raise money for PLs. Usually you have to have come sort of cred to do it. I know of only 3 projects to have raised VC money for a PL project, and they each had some success before they had done so: Chris Granger (Light Table), Paul Biggar (CircleCI), and Chris Lattner (Swift/LLVM). Granger's project Eve raised $2M and ran out of money after 3 years; Biggar's project Dark also raised money, then fired all the devs when he realized he was burning cash too fast, then he slow-burned development for years, then he gave up and handed development over to someone else; and Lattner raised almost $100M for Mojo, which is probably going to end much the same way as Eve and Dark, but I wish them the best.

Anyway, the point is that you personally (no offense) don't have the profile to raise $100M like Lattner. $2M is not enough for a PL project. Lattner is keeping Mojo closed source for now because there's no good answer for how they're going to make enough money as an open source language to justify raising $100M.

And the reason it's so hard to raise money is because there's no money to be made. No one pays for PLs. No one pays for PL dev tools. They have to be open source or they're rejected by the dev community. The only ones these days who can reasonably pay for all of this with no potential revenue stream are giant corporations, who use the lang as a hook into their ecosystem.

3. Even though the answer is no, you yourself can still get an MVP off the ground in a pretty reasonable amount of time. It's never been easier to make a PL. The problem with PLs is building them is kind of like measuring the coastline; language projects are fractals -- there's an infinite amount of detail you can work on in any given direction. It's very easy for a language project to become a language + editor project, and it's easy for that to turn into language + editor + operating system if you're not disciplined. Plenty of PL devs have fallen into that trap.

4. Rounds to 0% chance. You'll be lucky if you build something that even you will use. Rather, most PL devs end up working on their language in some other language, because working on languages is what they want to do!

That said, it's still important to write languages that you understand no one will use. First it allows you to try new things that may good but unpopular. If PL devs only did what was popular with devs, PLs would go nowhere as a field.

Consider the so called "Hornet's nest" of programming languages [1], which is the tightly related cluster of imperative programming languages which have been the most researched and used over the last 50 years. There is a vaaaaaaaast design space outside that nest, begging for more language development. No one will use most of them, but it's important to understand what those languages might look like to maybe find some new ideas that work.

Also "didn't make it" is kind of an unfair judgement. Gaining popularity doesn't have to be a goal. In fact, it shouldn't be a goal if you want to have any fun at all. There's an infinite amount of work to be done, and if you're not doing it for you, you won't get far at all. That's really the only way to fail at this.

Good luck!

[1] https://tomasp.net/techdims/#footer=index,navigation;left=ca...