On 17 Aug 2010, at 17:13, Hiltibidal, Rob wrote:
Does anyone actually pay for perl?
http://www.perlfoundation.org/sponsors
For Java?
Previously Sun, now Oracle.
For python?
For groovy?
http://groovy.codehaus.org/ says it's "Sustained & led by SpringSource"
For jython?
It's also supported by the Python Foundation.
Company's pay and pay well for products made in those languages and support for products in those languages.
And for the development of those languages and their compilers as well.
Guess what I am saying since other languages already have the functionality built into them for company's to be competitive why would a company pay to reinvent the wheel?
First of all, it's not reinventing the wheel since an ISO Standard/Extended Pascal compiler is not the same as a Perl/Java/Python/... compiler. In fact, the proposed project is exactly to only develop the Pascal frontend and to reuse what can be reused from other projects (the code generation part).
Secondly, the investment in the development of such a compiler may be offset by the combined savings in a) having to rewrite all your existing code b) retraining yourself and others in becoming proficient in another language + framework (it can take quite a while until you reach the same level of productivity in the other development environment)
On the other hand a few people with a love of a language pulling together to build and play catch up to make a language robust and mature...
I've not seen anyone here talking about changing the language. They want to use the existing language with a modern compiler.
Jonas