Last time: “Hidden Special Purpose Languages,” in which we said that cool languages can be a secret sauce embedded within useful products.
Now: What about having each product share a common language?

[This is an excerpt from a Lisp conference talk I gave in 2002.] [Read More!]

Last time: “Every Application Architecture Has Plenty of Languages,” in which we said that IT was full of enough languages to keep any language lawyer busy.
Now: Well clearly there’s room for languages work, but where are the language products hiding?

[This is an excerpt from a Lisp conference talk I gave in 2002.] [Read More!]

Last time: “What Do Buyers Want?,” in which I said that employers want specialists in technologies, which doesn't really help the employers solve problems.
Now: Where does that leave us? Where’s the language vendor in this picture? Where does the language guru go?

[This is an excerpt from a Lisp conference talk I gave in 2002.] [Read More!]

In 2002 I gave an invited talk at a Lisp conference in San Francisco. I was scheduled while I was Technical Strategist at a hotshot Lisp-like company founded by Tim Berners-Lee. I gave the talk right after the strategy department was disolved and I was fired with it. (John was in the same department.)

As I remember, it wasn't well received. (But I was pretty grumpy at the time and considered myself to be not well received by the world in general.) The writing and speaking wasn't great, and some of the ideas were marginal. But I think a lot of the ideas have stood up pretty well, and I still believe them. I'm going to serialize it here, so that I can reference it in future blogs.

Abstract

The last few years have seen a lot of new language development, but commercial success has eluded many good language companies. A framework for success is presented, in which language systems are recast as open platforms for some class of application. Multi-tier marketing is examined, in which a free or low cost application enlarges the platform’s community, while revenues are produced on an upper-tier product or service. The presentation will be followed by a fishbowl discussion, in which everyone is encouraged to join the conversation. [Read More!]