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It's not the hard part of "designing a compiler" but who wants to "design a compiler?"
In ordinary software people spend most of their time modifying existing code. I wouldn't want to reinvent "javac" or "cpython" but adding a new feature to a compiler like that should be easy.
Alternately there are a number of "compiler-technology based tools" that we don't have. Instead we get problems like
https://www.liquibase.org/
which defines a whole new XML-based language to manage database changes. That's like jumping from the frying pan to the fire since you're still going to have to understand your RDBMS, how to write SQL for it, what the non-standard features are in your database, etc.
A sane tool like that would use an extensible parser generator to easily support the variant syntaxes of different SQL dialects and would be able to parse and unparse SQL or a variant of SQL to define change sets.
(speaking of which... shouldn't a compiler generator automatically make something that can reverse the AST back to source code?)
A while back I had the problem that arangodb scrambled the order of columns in JSON result sets and wrote something that parsed the AQL, figured out what the order of the columns was, and turned the result sets into nice pandas frames.
If "writing compilers" was easier people would write "compilers" that do things other than compiling to machine code.
There are many reasons why there are not many PL startups. From my perspective--as a PL tool developer for 40 years--is that we still do not have reliable formal grammars that describe the syntax and static semantics for a given programming language. That is a crux because it is difficult to write a tool for a language when we cannot even define what that language is. When you ask where to find a grammar for the language, the default answer is to just use an "official" implementation. That often requires a large amount of time to find and understand an API--and then locks you into that implementation. Some of the popular languages publish a grammar derived by a human reading the implementation after the fact, prone to errors. For C#, the standards committee is still trying to describe version 6 of the language (https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/tree/main/spec), and we are now on version 10. An Antlr4 grammar for C# is mechanically reverse engineered from the IR, but it does not work out of the box--it contains several mutual left recursions and does not correctly describe the operator precedence and associativity. Julia does not even have a formal grammar published for the language. You cannot easily refactor a formal grammar from something that does not even exist, and have to write it from scratch. Often, what is published is out of sync from the implementation, not versioned, tied to a particular parser generator and target language with semantic predicates. The quality is suspect because you are unsure whether it even follows a spec. No one bothers to enumerate the refactorings involved in modifying the grammar to fit a parser generator, or for optimization, e.g., speed or memory. Yes, I can agree: “[t]here's definitely a need for SOMETHING, as developers have so much pain.”
Some recent programming langue startups that are still around or have come and gone:
- Dark: https://darklang.com (hibernating, laid off everyone to buy time to find product/market fit)
- Eve: http://witheve.com (defunct)
- Luna/Enso: https://enso.org (just rebranded)
- Unison: https://www.unisonweb.org (hanging in there)
- Urbit: https://urbit.org (hanging in there)
That's off the top of my head. I'm surprised an article asking this doesn't mention any of them or analyze how they came to be and where they went.
The main reason from my perspective is there's not funding. It takes years to build a programming language from scratch, so you need a lot of runway. And it takes a specialized group of developers so they cost a lot of money to hire. The combination of the two means you need a lot of money to get a PL off the ground. Millions of dollars.
The most likely way to get that kind of money right now is going through VCs, and they aren't going to give you anything for a safer systems language or a JavaScript transpiler. They want to be pitched a world-changing language that will redefine the computing landscape as we know it, and bring billions of people into the programming world. You might notice that as a common denominator among some of the languages I listed above.
But this is a research problem with an uncertain time horizon and unknown feasibility. It could take a decade more to complete such a task, but it's very unlikely you're going to get a decade worth of funding from VCs. You'll probably get 3-5 years, and at the end of that you'll need to have something tangible that can get you follow-on funding to continue your work. But that means your original pitch of revolutionizing the computing landscape by democratizing programming gets downgraded to making an incremental change that increases some productivity for developers.
Anyway, there are ways to get around this, but it likely means your company won't be a "startup" in the HN VC-funded sense. See Unison which is developed under public benefit corp. Andrew Kelley has managed to bootstrap Zip using user support and now corporate support. Urbit had an ICO and sells digital real estate.
Some recent programming langue startups that are still around or have come and gone:
- Dark: https://darklang.com (hibernating, laid off everyone to buy time to find product/market fit)
- Eve: http://witheve.com (defunct)
- Luna/Enso: https://enso.org (just rebranded)
- Unison: https://www.unisonweb.org (hanging in there)
- Urbit: https://urbit.org (hanging in there)
That's off the top of my head. I'm surprised an article asking this doesn't mention any of them or analyze how they came to be and where they went.
The main reason from my perspective is there's not funding. It takes years to build a programming language from scratch, so you need a lot of runway. And it takes a specialized group of developers so they cost a lot of money to hire. The combination of the two means you need a lot of money to get a PL off the ground. Millions of dollars.
The most likely way to get that kind of money right now is going through VCs, and they aren't going to give you anything for a safer systems language or a JavaScript transpiler. They want to be pitched a world-changing language that will redefine the computing landscape as we know it, and bring billions of people into the programming world. You might notice that as a common denominator among some of the languages I listed above.
But this is a research problem with an uncertain time horizon and unknown feasibility. It could take a decade more to complete such a task, but it's very unlikely you're going to get a decade worth of funding from VCs. You'll probably get 3-5 years, and at the end of that you'll need to have something tangible that can get you follow-on funding to continue your work. But that means your original pitch of revolutionizing the computing landscape by democratizing programming gets downgraded to making an incremental change that increases some productivity for developers.
Anyway, there are ways to get around this, but it likely means your company won't be a "startup" in the HN VC-funded sense. See Unison which is developed under public benefit corp. Andrew Kelley has managed to bootstrap Zip using user support and now corporate support. Urbit had an ICO and sells digital real estate.
Some recent programming langue startups that are still around or have come and gone:
- Dark: https://darklang.com (hibernating, laid off everyone to buy time to find product/market fit)
- Eve: http://witheve.com (defunct)
- Luna/Enso: https://enso.org (just rebranded)
- Unison: https://www.unisonweb.org (hanging in there)
- Urbit: https://urbit.org (hanging in there)
That's off the top of my head. I'm surprised an article asking this doesn't mention any of them or analyze how they came to be and where they went.
The main reason from my perspective is there's not funding. It takes years to build a programming language from scratch, so you need a lot of runway. And it takes a specialized group of developers so they cost a lot of money to hire. The combination of the two means you need a lot of money to get a PL off the ground. Millions of dollars.
The most likely way to get that kind of money right now is going through VCs, and they aren't going to give you anything for a safer systems language or a JavaScript transpiler. They want to be pitched a world-changing language that will redefine the computing landscape as we know it, and bring billions of people into the programming world. You might notice that as a common denominator among some of the languages I listed above.
But this is a research problem with an uncertain time horizon and unknown feasibility. It could take a decade more to complete such a task, but it's very unlikely you're going to get a decade worth of funding from VCs. You'll probably get 3-5 years, and at the end of that you'll need to have something tangible that can get you follow-on funding to continue your work. But that means your original pitch of revolutionizing the computing landscape by democratizing programming gets downgraded to making an incremental change that increases some productivity for developers.
Anyway, there are ways to get around this, but it likely means your company won't be a "startup" in the HN VC-funded sense. See Unison which is developed under public benefit corp. Andrew Kelley has managed to bootstrap Zip using user support and now corporate support. Urbit had an ICO and sells digital real estate.