The problem was summed up nicely in Stephen Diehl's "Near Future of Programming Languages" which I've posted as separately another comment (http://dev.stephendiehl.com/nearfuture.pdf). Here's an important slide:
"Where will the next great programming language come from?
Academia? NO. No incentive to do engineering. Those that do are committing career suicide. Funding is drying up for fundamental research.
Industry? NO. Can’t fund anything that doesn’t have a return beyond a fiscal quarter. Incrementalism doesn’t move things forward.
Hobbyists? NO. No economic means. Modern implementations require multiple FTE and decades.
Will we just be stuck in a local maxima of Java for next 50 years?"
I've personally attempted to create a sort of Manhattan Project of getting some top minds together in an off-site location to work on it in earnest. (I'm not joking. In 2018, I found a small 13-room hotel near Nice, France and made an attempt to get a bunch of us sequestered there for a year. Alan Kay liked the idea, by the way.)
None of that is happening. The sad truth is that the computer revolution isn’t even being worked on.
> None of that is happening. The sad truth is that the computer revolution isn’t even being worked on.
in later talks alan kay would say "the best way to predict the future is to prevent it" and i generally feel the same way...
it seems most commercial interests are interested in refining what already is, than building thind that are completely new (and who can blame them, its really risky to do so)
There's a definite "Innovator's Dilemma" situation going on where the most anyone wants to backtrack is a few feet, and the solution is to backtrack a couple of miles.
The irony is that everything is that by not investing in this, we've been eating our seed corn. There's been a dearth of innovation for decades and markets are desperate for growth but none is coming.
> There's been a dearth of innovation for decades and markets are desperate for growth but none is coming.
its intersting dilemma for sure... i think alan kay also said, the innovations for xerox park only cost a few tens of millions of dollars, with the economic impact of literally trillions...
