Comment by ModernMech

> Bold plus, making PLs is a lifestyle, not a business.

Yeah, whenever I encounter a new language, to see how serious they are, I take a look at their github commit history. Usually they are all green every day, there's a sort of obsessive compulsion behind working on these projects.

It's pretty amazing how the boundary of what a PL actually is has expanded. It's really the story of "If you give a mouse a cookie"....

Used to be back in the day you didn't even have to implement the thing (ISWIM). But if you give the people a programming language they're going to expect a compiler to use it. Then devs started expecting a whole standard library sometime after the 70s. By the 80s and 90s IDEs were all the range -- you needed to provide at least syntax highlighting for sure. A breakpoint debugger was starting to become standard expectation.

In the 90s - 00s, open source rose to prominence and communities of open source developers works to create robust community-driven language ecosystems, which then became an expectation for new langs. Quite the paradox there -- how do you create a community around a new language if the new members expect a community??

But once you have a robust package ecosystem, devs start expecting ways to manage it. So now you not only need a package manager, but also a package repository and all the issues which come with that.

Now with all these packages you also need to provide a robust build system to download them all, build each one, link the binary, and it should be compatible with all major operating systems, all major architectures, and of course the web.

Today, LSPs were the most recent "must have", before "AI integration" took over and now you need to have AI assistants that know your language and all the libraries.

All that before you even start talking about the language specifics. To be popular, your language must a) be severely limited in its "weirdness budget" (the degree to which you break from tratitional languages must be a small delta or potential users complain) b) be imperative-first c) and most importantly, be open source and charge exactly $0 for all of this.

That's why the quickest way to build a new and different language is actually to create a cult around it. If you're gonna make any money at all, it'll be in selling plushies of your mascot. I wrote a whole novel about that route here a couple weeks ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806741