I work for a company that developed its own programming language and has been selling it for over twenty years for a great deal of money. For many of those twenty years, I worked in the group developing the language. Before working for my current employer, I participated in several language development efforts. I say this not in order to toot my own horn, but to indicate that what I say has some weight of experience behind it.
There is no way to get the funding you want. I am sorry to tell you this.
From a funder’s point of view, there are several effects that make this a bad bet. First, the difference between reasonably up-to-date general-purpose languages does not seem to be that large. This is as measured by actual effectiveness of projects (manager view) as opposed to whether a language is fun to use (engineer view). So presumably a new language will not offer a large improvement. If your language meets a combination of needs not served by any existing language, that may be a way around this. Second, every person who invents a new programming language thinks it will be a marvelous advance over all existing languages. It’s like how every parent thinks their baby is the cutest. Some of them are actually right, but since all of them think this, a funder has no way of telling which is which. Third, as you note above, it is hard to monetize a new language. This means that the capitalist startup system will not be helpful to you. Fourth, much of language design is a balancing of imponderables (simplicity vs power, garbage collection vs control, etc.) There’s no way to measure these before funding the project, so no way to make confident predictions of whether a new language will be an advance. So the backing of a project is even more of a leap of faith than it usually is. (Some of this risk can be retired by releasing an interpreter and documentation before writing a compiler.)
I work for a company that developed its own programming language and has been selling it for over twenty years for a great deal of money. For many of those twenty years, I worked in the group developing the language. Before working for my current employer, I participated in several language development efforts. I say this not in order to toot my own horn, but to indicate that what I say has some weight of experience behind it.
There is no way to get the funding you want. I am sorry to tell you this.
From a funder’s point of view, there are several effects that make this a bad bet. First, the difference between reasonably up-to-date general-purpose languages does not seem to be that large. This is as measured by actual effectiveness of projects (manager view) as opposed to whether a language is fun to use (engineer view). So presumably a new language will not offer a large improvement. If your language meets a combination of needs not served by any existing language, that may be a way around this. Second, every person who invents a new programming language thinks it will be a marvelous advance over all existing languages. It’s like how every parent thinks their baby is the cutest. Some of them are actually right, but since all of them think this, a funder has no way of telling which is which. Third, as you note above, it is hard to monetize a new language. This means that the capitalist startup system will not be helpful to you. Fourth, much of language design is a balancing of imponderables (simplicity vs power, garbage collection vs control, etc.) There’s no way to measure these before funding the project, so no way to make confident predictions of whether a new language will be an advance. So the backing of a project is even more of a leap of faith than it usually is. (Some of this risk can be retired by releasing an interpreter and documentation before writing a compiler.)
It’s lousy and it sucks. Sorry.