> And for what it's worth, Wasabi might have become a noteworthy language outside Fog Creek. There was no way to know at the time.
Nobody could know most things at the time. But we can estimate. What are the odds that small, random companies creating languages as side projects will have success? Well, looking at the languages everybody uses, I'd say: not so good.
> For example, Erlang started out being an internal tool at just one company, designed to solve a specific set of problems.
It was just one company, but it was one very large company working on something that they expected to be in operation for decades. So I think that's a bit different than a small company working on a product.
Hobbies are very different than company projects like this. With hobbies, we don't really care about ROI; we do it for the fun of it. In companies, ROI is very important.
And naming the successes doesn't tell you much about the odds; you also have to count the failures. One can't justify the purchase of a lottery ticket by looking only at the winners.
Sure, but that strikes me as the exception that proves the rule. JS succeeded not because of language merits, but because it had strong distribution. JS was basically held in contempt for a decade until the platforms and the language matured enough to make it useful for something more than button rollovers and form validation.
I've been holding it in contempt for two decades and doubt I will ever stop. Spending some time on a static analysis project for JS recently only reinforced that opinion.
Nobody could know most things at the time. But we can estimate. What are the odds that small, random companies creating languages as side projects will have success? Well, looking at the languages everybody uses, I'd say: not so good.
> For example, Erlang started out being an internal tool at just one company, designed to solve a specific set of problems.
It was just one company, but it was one very large company working on something that they expected to be in operation for decades. So I think that's a bit different than a small company working on a product.