>Which reminds me. If you are a Julia enthusiast, how do you suppose the investors in this new language plan to make their big score?

This is a weird jab at Julia. Open source software is woefully underfunded. Julia Computing was founded in the wake of Heartbleed where people learned that open source needs some kind of funding to keep developers alive (example article: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/tech-... ). Coming from academic backgrounds, the core contributors really had two options if they wanted to devote full time to Julia: either everyone gets an academic job while working on Julia instead of papers (lol), or band together to get R&D funding and use that to fund a life of open source development. They did the latter.

It's quite silly to even imply there's something nefarious that can go on here. Their main product is the language. They can't sabotage that without sabotaging themselves. They may have some priorities swayed, just like how any other individual who's working on open source is doing it for their own reasons. For example, IBM funded them to add PowerPC support, and what do you know Julia works on PowerPC. Is that so awful? With this funding model, what ends up happening is you have a large group of people who dedicate their lives to developing open sourced code for automatic GPU compilation, machine learning libraries, etc. along with compiler support for optimizing scientific computing. Because of this (and other reasons), Julia ends up having a much stronger governance which is one reason why its development ends up being more active. And this activity in turn makes its project more democratic than projects like CPython or Jupyter which have been larger projects for a longer time, but with less contributors (Julia's 686 vs CPython's 524 vs Jupyter's 330).

And most of the Julia contributors aren't even part of that company! Many are academics. A lot of the funding is through NumFOCUS, a non-profit which also helps projects like Jupyter, matplotlib, etc. which the author is for! (And they are great projects as well!)

So while I am happy that the author is pro open source, I think it's necessary to point out that this open source outsider view is both wrong and dangerous. Saying that you love the purity and despise anyone who gets to make a living from it is harmful! Open source is a labor of love, but it has also destroyed many careers. I think society has this view that open source (mathematical) projects are "funded" by academic careers, but even creators of popular projects like SageMath have publicly noted that open source is harmful to academic success (https://escapethetower.wordpress.com/2016/06/13/creator-of-s...).

Instead of being against funding open source contributors, I would like to see the author promote funding for open source. Paul Romer is a leading economist. He has the power to proclaim that open source matters for academic careers and push for it to be put on equal footing with papers for grant applications in his field. People like him should be advocating for jobs dedicated to open source development, not scoffing at the supposed impurity of someone being paid to develop a public good. Someone at the top of the academic hierarchy should start a change and make the development of public tools as valued as the development of (non-public) publications.