The point I was making is for something to get enough traction, so that it would get active contributors who help mature the language, tools, etc.

I think there are only handful of people out there who can contribute in a meaningful way for a project like this. If they are consumed working on open source Swift or doing pull request on many things pushed by FB or Google or working contributing to existing projects like GHC, etc. Then the Alpaca project wont get the contributors it needs to show progress. If there is no progress, it falls into a vicious circle of no progress -> no traction -> no contributors -> no progress

The good news is that you don't need that big of a community for a language to do well. It does, of course, need to be big enough, but you don't need to compete too hard with the big corporation-backed languages to have your language community grow enough that it can sustain itself.

Of course, I guess I don't have any real data on it, so this is just my intuition based on observing various languages. So, you know, just my 2 cents.

Open source is massively corporatist. Developers working for $0 to create tool chains that other developers spend their weekend learning so that the shareholders of their employers can increase their wealth.

There does seem to be a significant push to contribute to open-source at many large companies. Having money and people contributing as part (or all) of their day job can be quite a boon for projects.

I agree with the premise of your point, though.