Why aren't there more programming-language startups?
First off, this article isn&#x27;t actually answering the strawman question it looks like its asking. I think most people who don&#x27;t work in the space would assume the question means &quot;why aren&#x27;t there people selling new languages&#x2F;compilers?&quot; That&#x27;s a strawman question with a trivial answer, though--free compilers have been the de facto standard for decades [1], so if all you have is a new compiler or a new programming language, you&#x27;re going to make only a pittance on it directly.<p>The <i>actual</i> question is why are there so few startups for people who work on PL technologies--which isn&#x27;t limited to compilers or programming languages, but includes things like IDEs, debuggers, static analyzers [2]. For example, Coverity--a decently well-known paid static analyzer--is kind of the best model of what you&#x27;d expect to see more of here. So it is somewhat more interesting to ask why this tool space isn&#x27;t particularly well-served as a market.<p>[1] The biggest exception to the rule is custom hardware (particularly embedded, but this also holds true for mainframe and HPC systems), where custom compilers come for the ride. But that would be a hardware startup, not a PL startup, so it doesn&#x27;t really count.<p>[2] I tend to lump in decompilers into the formal methods&#x2F;PL&#x2F;compilers&#x2F;software engineering&#x2F;computer architecture spectrum, mainly being a low-level compiler developer myself, but I suspect most people would consider reverse engineering tools to be a security side of things rather than a PL side things. And decompilers are certainly another noticeable successful paid-software niche, with the very expensive IDA Pro still remaining more or less the industry standard.