# The Economics of Programming Languages

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/the-economics-of-programming-languages/104644>\
**Category:** Community\
**Created:** [October 6, 2023, 3:16am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/the-economics-of-programming-languages/104644 "2023-10-06T03:16:09Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![mrufsvold](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/mrufsvold/32/31600_2.png) [@mrufsvold](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mrufsvold)\
**Post date:** [October 6, 2023, 3:16am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/the-economics-of-programming-languages/104644/1 "2023-10-06T03:16:09Z")

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Next time a user tries to asks “How do we get that Google money?” I think we can just skip the 900 posts and all rewatch this video by the maker of Elm.

[![](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/original/3X/c/b/cb8b11fec46cf1cf9ef21ac736050f686f79de6a.jpeg ""The Economics of Programming Languages" by Evan Czaplicki (Strange Loop 2023)") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8)

Edit: Tl;Dr (updating now that it isn’t so late here) – Swift, Dart, C#, and their corporate ilk have buckets of developer time and a whole infrastructure for doing marketing and support for users. Javascript has a consortium of internet landlords (Chrome and friends) who push forward development so they can keep extracting rent.

Independent languages have a few avenues to get the funding they need to try to keep pace, but at the end of the day, Independent language developers need to spend 50% of their time writing code and 50% of their time “selling” the language, maintaining infrastructure, etc. So all a Jeff Bezo needs to do is pay someone for 60% of their time on language dev to outpace you, steal your ideas, and turn a profit off your insights. And getting Jeff’ed sucks.

How do independent languages keep pace? Well, except for unicorns like Python, Evan Czaplicki says… 🤷

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**Author:** ![ParadaCarleton](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/paradacarleton/32/20005_2.png) [@ParadaCarleton](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ParadaCarleton)\
**Post date:** [October 6, 2023, 3:59am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/the-economics-of-programming-languages/104644/2 "2023-10-06T03:59:32Z")

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I like the video, but from what I can tell his answer is ¯\_(ツ)\_/¯ or, at best, “Make friends with someone really rich before you get Jeff’d.”

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**Author:** ![mrufsvold](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/mrufsvold/32/31600_2.png) [@mrufsvold](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mrufsvold)\
**Post date:** [October 6, 2023, 5:37am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/the-economics-of-programming-languages/104644/3 "2023-10-06T05:37:52Z")

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My point is that maybe, instead of pontificating about what WhatJuliaNeeds™, we (I) would benefit from the humility of recognizing that if Evan Czaplicki’s best answer is ¯\_(ツ)\_/¯, then mine certainly is too.

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**Author:** ![ParadaCarleton](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/paradacarleton/32/20005_2.png) [@ParadaCarleton](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/ParadaCarleton)\
**Post date:** [October 6, 2023, 4:49pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/the-economics-of-programming-languages/104644/4 "2023-10-06T16:49:26Z")

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That’s fair. I think most of these arguments have had an assumption that good programming languages get adopted and bad ones don’t, while Evan’s argument is more or less “not really.”