I'm part of Team Red, though I only speak for myself here.

TL;DR -- Tools and infrastructure

It's true that people don't pay for languages, but did they ever? Mostly, people have paid for tools. Tools that help them solve problems. In the early days, nobody paid for any software. Then there was a period where MS, Borland, Zortech, and others sold boxed compilers for C/C++, Pascal, Basic, and even Prolog (Borland Turbo Prolog, yep). Later Visual Basic and a raft of RAD tools, many of which had languages in them. And Hypercard had its day.

Now you don't pay for languages, very clearly, but did you ever, really? Yes, in smaller numbers. For example, people paid for MSBASIC/PDS, QuickBasic, TrueBASIC, GFABasic, XBasic, PowerBasic, or Visual Basic, because each had features they needed. But they didn't need, or pay for BASIC. They paid because the tool was effective and fit their needs.

Red is not just an exercise, but building a language is hard, slow, deliberate work, especially when you do it from the ground up. That's why other langs don't do it that way. They compile to another language, now often transpiling, to leverage the existing infrastructure. This can be a big win, but you also get all the baggage of the old system, which is a cost.

Did JetBrains create Kotlin, hoping to cash in on the language itself? I don't have inside info, but I don't think so. Smart people they are. They sell tools, and being able to provide the first and best tool(s) for a new lang is a huge opportunity. Not to mention having all the experts in the language, for consulting and contract work day one. Everybody else has to play catch-up.

Do you see where I'm headed?

Those are just a couple ways you can be a commercial success by building a language. And that's a necessity. To win, we have to survive.

But that's not what motivates our programmer hearts. Fighting software complexity, showing people there's a better way, making the world a better place by improving how software is built, at all levels; that is what drives us. Software development, if not broken, is at least very, very bent.

Why are there so many Low Code tools out there? Is mobile dev as easy as it could be? Are we there yet? How far have we progressed, in how software is built, since 1970? Do you have all the tools you wish you had in your language of choice? Why not? Why does it take 7 languages and 20 supporting tools and frameworks, all with different syntax, models, and runtime needs to build a simple web app today? Why does "Javascript Fatigue" exist as a term? Is containerization a solution, or simply a band-aid over cancer? Left-pad anyone?

You ask "Where's the market?" Well, it's everywhere, and Red can do everything (or will, before too long ;^). So we have to narrow it down. We hate doing that for the language, because it gives people a keyhole view of what Red can do. That's where specific products and tools come in. They, like dialects are to the base language, have a sharp focus.

There are massive opportunities to be had. And not just by us. Does Brendan Eich get JS royalties? Does Douglas Crockford get JSON kickbacks? Did they change the world, and have a lot of people made a lot of money because those technologies exist? You bet they have. But think even bigger, if you can, because what if you could be compensated for creating great tech that others leverage? And if you think Red won't win because it's Lisp+Forth+Logo, has free ranging evaluation, or other things a dev can pick syntax nits about, that's fine too. JS has flaws, but look at all the dialects that transpile to it. Those are just DSLs, if you think about it, constrained versions. And what is Red better at than any other language?

Thanks for listening.