>From a marketing perspective a price point in the 100s is definitely more reasonable than the thousands, obviously :-)
What's I think is the interesting point about this discussion is "What are the hurdles toward acceptance of any new language, scripting or not, into a given community?" Obviously OCAML and the ML languages have deeply penetrated some markets but haven't even dented others. There have been lots of papers, studies, and discussion written on this (
lambda-the-ultimate.org has many of them archived) so that's probably something for a different thread to be read wearing flame-retardant underthings.
Professionally I'm in a community that could deeply benefit from the type of language that would allow for scripting, data analysis, etc, that could then be directly compiled into tight executable code. While the barriers to entry to that market could be high, I'm in a position where I could see selling it. I could actually get really excited about this.
Probably something to take off list if this is something to pursue
On 3/7/07, skaller <skaller@users.sourceforge.net
> wrote:On Wed, 2007-03-07 at 22:19 -0500, Jim Miller wrote:
> Ah, I misunderstood ...
>
> I would say that with the researchers I know of and work with, the
> answer would be no. $5K these days is a lot of money for most of the
> scientists I'm working with, to the point that they're actually using
> Octave and R (free) and moving away from buying their analysis
> packages.
So how about $500? I just picked a random number out of the air.
Don't forget .. the general framework Harrop describes isn't
restricted to the science market, certainly not just atmospherics.
Although with the current hype about global warming, atmospheric
modelling might get additional funds pumped in .. :)
--
John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net>
Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net