I understand your concern, but, as I said, a number of authors have not have financing, plans for new contributors, etc. in the beginning and have been successful; these are not requirement for success in the beginning.<p>For example, here is the story of how Python got its start from Guido van Rossum (quote from 1996):<p>&quot;Over six years ago, in December 1989, I was looking for a &quot;hobby&quot; programming project that would keep me occupied during the week around Christmas. My office ... would be closed, but I had a home computer, and not much else on my hands. I decided to write an interpreter for the new scripting language I had been thinking about lately: a descendant of ABC that would appeal to Unix&#x2F;C hackers. I chose Python as a working title for the project, being in a slightly irreverent mood (and a big fan of Monty Python&#x27;s Flying Circus).&quot;<p>And the history of how Ruby got its start by Yukihiro Matsumoto (quote from 1999) is similar:<p>&quot;I was talking with my colleague about the possibility of an object-oriented scripting language. I knew Perl (Perl4, not Perl5), but I didn&#x27;t like it really, because it had the smell of a toy language (it still has). The object-oriented language seemed very promising. I knew Python then. But I didn&#x27;t like it, because I didn&#x27;t think it was a true object-oriented language — OO features appeared to be add-on to the language. As a language maniac and OO fan for 15 years, I really wanted a genuine object-oriented, easy-to-use scripting language. I looked for but couldn&#x27;t find one. So I decided to make it.&quot;<p>Denys Shabalin is working under the author of Scala and corresponding regularly with the author of Scala.js, so he has more support than either van Rossum or Matsumoto did, and neither of them had the plans you spoke of- they just wrote the language because it is what they wanted to do.