Are there are free tools for becoming a mechanic? No, they got to be paid, either new or used in some form.
And yes, nowadays there is a community version for the free beer crowd.
We are speaking about the adoption of languages, though ("Sadly it never got a big name sponsor to push it."), not languages in abstracto, and for that available implementations matter.
>Are there are free tools for becoming a mechanic? No, they got to be paid, either new or used in some form
Which is neither here, nor there. Things are different for programmers, where there are free and/or libre tools, and people have come to expect them and even prefer them.
I will love to see the world where such programmers get paid 100% the same way they are willing to pay for their tooling.
Exactly the same way.
Yeah, but not for Eiffel :-)
>I will love to see the world where such programmers get paid 100% the same way they are willing to pay for their tooling.
Aside from those language devs getting paid (which core dev teams for otherwise given for fre/ FOSS languages like Java, C#, Swift, Go, etc also are), what else would change?
Paid/proprietary is orthogonal to better languages/tooling. If popular compilers/apis were paid, we could just as well get the same commercial crap, lack of interest, bloat, needless novelty, etc. that we get with most paid proprietary software and hardware.
And even worse, since they would be both out of reach for amateurs/students/developing world/etc, and crappy "enterprise level" for the rest, driven by what sells to pointy hair bosses, not programmers.
When it comes to adoption, an area where Eiffel has clearly lagged, the availability of implementations can't be an afterthought; not when you have good, free implementations for Python, Ruby, Go, Rust, Julia, and many more.
Objective-C and Swift are interesting languages that are held back by the fact that the best environment is Xcode on a Mac. Similarly, Qt has been plagued by license anxiety for years (first the QPL, and now the delayed LGPL releases). Therefore, I would say that one of the "obvious, non-negotiable things any new OO language should have," to quote the article, is a good open source implementation.
Even UNIX's license had to be paid in some form, although symbolic.
But if there were widely available free tools for mechanics, the people making paid ones would have a lot of difficulty getting mechanics to pay for them.
They should repair my car for free as well.
Feeling happy that someone left the garage with a working car is a good enough reward.
