Ouch, those prices though. It's 100% their right to choose how they want to distribute their language, of course! But there's no plausible scenario where I'd ever write with a proprietary language implementation, let alone one I had to pay for. There are too many free/Free options to voluntarily lock myself in for any of the kinds of things I ever work on.
I don't have a big problem with the money: it's a fraction of month's salary. The usual problem with commercial languages is the freedom to set things up how I want and spin up new environments quickly. Mathematica, for instance, is a significant pain to run on my laptop, desktop, and a cloud machine.
I think there's room to innovate in licensing. I would err on the side of making it easy to install at the cost of some piracy. A great language could 100x its market share by losing 1/2 to piracy, so 50x overall.
What I'm most curious about is how they get new developers in the first place? Nobody starting their career is going to think "I need to become proficient in a language, how about the obscure one I have to pay $1000 for".
They can't have much of a marketing spend or I would expect to have heard of them. Who is their audience? As an old Turbo Pascal programmer, I'm not asking that rhetorically, I'm genuinely curious.
I feel like the better "model" would have been to make a free and open source language with some structure to lead it (even could have been in house only like sql or something) and then create highly specialized tooling to go with the language sort of like Microsoft or Jetbrains does. I don't really condone this either, but at least it would have a chance to get off the ground.
Its a reallyyyy hard sell to pay for a language just so that you can create software, especially something that sounds scary like Pascal. (idk anything about Pascal specifically but thats the vibe I get and I guess people will feel similarly) what happens if I build something with a proprietary language and the rug gets pulled out from underneath me? Thats the kind of concern people should have. Thats a LOT of trust before even starting programming. Especially when so many great languages with great ecosystems already exist for free and extensive examples and docs.
I am not opposed to paid languages, but my expectations for a paid product is much higher than a free one. A lot of things I am perfectly fine with from a free language would be unacceptable from a paid one.
