I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig

Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by christophilus on Thursday June 07, 2018 @11:29AM (#17256658)

Sounds more as if he thinks a new programming language might possibly be able to let him eke out a living while doing work he enjoys. No riches in sight, so far as my reading of it is concerned.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by gizmo on Thursday June 07, 2018 @11:26AM (#17256623)

That's a little mean. The author writes:

> 100% of donations I receive go towards paying rent, buying food, and generally attempting to live a modest, but healthy life.

He doesn't expect to get rich from this.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by rhacker on Thursday June 07, 2018 @11:43AM (#17256834)

Even so, at some point if the language "takes off", a company out there may want to become a full-time sponsor. It's no riskier than a startup - and nicely bootstrapped with very low cost of maintaining it.

Kinda awesome actually he's doing what his passion is.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by amelius on Thursday June 07, 2018 @11:45AM (#17256864)

Also, who was the last person getting rich from a programming language?

Programming languages are more of an open-source thing. You can't make much money from them.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by Boulth on Thursday June 07, 2018 @11:48AM (#17256898)

Anders Hejlsberg got $1M for joining Microsoft: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by noir_lord on Thursday June 07, 2018 @12:11PM (#17257155)

To get the principal engineer behind the languages Turbo Pascal, Object Pascal (Delphi) and then C# and TypeScript that seems like the deal of the century if you factor the business value of all of the above.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by TimJYoung on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:14PM (#17258569)

Indeed, and at the time I was surprised that they got him for so little. There's so many design decisions in C# that resemble Object Pascal and Turbo Pascal, that it's pretty obvious that Anders=C# (not to take anything away from what are surely some of the best compiler engineers in the last few decades, I just don't know their names off-hand).

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by noir_lord on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:54PM (#17258971)

As someone who programmed heavily in Delphi back in the day their absolutely are and it's one of the reasons I like C# so much, it feels like home.

So does TypeScript.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by Boulth on Friday June 08, 2018 @01:02AM (#17262707)

I also used all languages designed by Anders, his practical approach is clearly visible in all of them. Unfortunately there are just a few interviews with him but they are all high quality: https://www.artima.com/intv/anders.html

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by shabda on Thursday June 07, 2018 @12:09PM (#17257127)

Which is hardly "getting rich" if you are as skilled as Anders Hejlsberg.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by klmr on Thursday June 07, 2018 @12:19PM (#17257252)

I’m pretty sure Anders’ salary at Microsoft qualifies him being called rich.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by jaredsohn on Thursday June 07, 2018 @12:54PM (#17257679)

I think the GP assumed that Anders was already rich before that so joining Microsoft didn't 'get him rich'. But if that was the case, based on his work history he may have still 'gotten rich' via programming languages, just from before Microsoft.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by gowld on Thursday June 07, 2018 @01:31PM (#17258087)

I think GP is saying that $1M isn't enough money to "get rich", and furthermore isn't particularly "for creating a language", for someone who could easily make $200K-$1M working on whatever Microsoft wants.

But GP forgot that the $1M was in 1997, before Google and Facebook and friends made non-founder engineers rich.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by emodendroket on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:42PM (#17258860)

Netscape?

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by microtherion on Thursday June 07, 2018 @12:57PM (#17257712)

By that standard, I would guess that Chris Lattner did OK when joining Tesla.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by gradschool on Thursday June 07, 2018 @12:14PM (#17257185)

I have a feeling some of the people involved with kx systems probably did well out of it. https://kx.com/about-kx/

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by wolco on Thursday June 07, 2018 @01:17PM (#17257930)

Open source can open many avenues of profit. I wonder what the creator of laravel makes with conferences, forge and paid support.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by sotojuan on Thursday June 07, 2018 @11:28AM (#17256650)

Not only does he probably have a good amount of savings, he can easily get a new job if this experiment fails. It’s a gutsy move I’d never be able to do but not really something he can’t recover from.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by asdfman123 on Thursday June 07, 2018 @12:17PM (#17257218)

Yeah, as a former senior engineer with a well known company, who took time off to develop his own programming language all he has to do is throw his resume into the recruiter feeding frenzy and immediately get a job.

While it's admirable, I can't really say it's risky. Risky is quitting in a field where people stay laid off for like a year.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by beagle3 on Thursday June 07, 2018 @01:23PM (#17257997)

It IS risky unless he has a cushion to fall on (lots of saving or trust fund). Life tends to pull out expensive rabbits out of hats, more of them as one gets older.

At $1000/month, a broken or stolen laptop or bicycle is ~two months. In the US (which he is) Any medical issue, or a baby, is somewhere between three months and bankruptcy.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by gowld on Thursday June 07, 2018 @01:32PM (#17258109)

He's taking a sabbatical, not retiring permanently. Sure, he needs to have some money saved up.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by asdfman123 on Thursday June 07, 2018 @01:36PM (#17258160)

Well, I assume he's going to be smart about it and have at least six months' income.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by ChristianGeek on Thursday June 07, 2018 @06:55PM (#17261104)

If he’s spending $2K on a bike then he’s not living a “modest” life.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by workinthehead on Friday June 08, 2018 @04:28AM (#17263599)

Baloney. If your bicycle is a serious mode of transportation that's not unreasonable at all.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by onion2k on Thursday June 07, 2018 @11:35AM (#17256732)

...to riches.

There are riches besides money.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by emodendroket on Thursday June 07, 2018 @01:24PM (#17258012)

Yes, but they end up being difficult to chase if you can't make rent or buy groceries.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by onion2k on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:56PM (#17258993)

There's a big bit in the middle between "homeless and starving" and "actually rich".

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by emodendroket on Friday June 08, 2018 @02:56PM (#17268618)

Of course there is, but my point is I could not do this without an expectation of penury.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by zawerf on Thursday June 07, 2018 @02:35PM (#17258784)

He's probably not going to get rich off patreon donations. The only developers that are doing well on patreon are being sponsored by real companies (or making adult games).

For example vue.js has 100k github stars and the creator is still only getting 15k a month on patreon and a good chunk of that comes from only a small handful of $2000 tier company sponsors: https://graphtreon.com/creator/evanyou. So that's probably a rough upperbound on how much the donation model can support.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by workinthehead on Friday June 08, 2018 @04:33AM (#17263614)

_Only_ 15k/month? Sounds like a pretty epic deal to me, getting paid a very healthy salary to set your own hours and work on your baby.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by cmontella on Thursday June 07, 2018 @05:31PM (#17260464)

As someone who writes programming languages, let me tell you that people who do so don't do it to get rich. We do it because we see great inefficiency in the world of systems that needs to be corrected. It's like people who are social justice activists. They're not getting rich either, but they're doing what needs to be done.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by star-castle on Thursday June 07, 2018 @11:33AM (#17256708)

Reminds me of the fellow that took a year off to create an amazing new version control system. He made svk, which was pretty good except for being followed too closely by git.

However good Zig looks, there's also Nim, ATS, Rust, and a dozen more. Seems like a good time for programming languages -- which means a dangerous time to quit your day job for one.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by sincerely on Thursday June 07, 2018 @12:07PM (#17257110)

realistically, i doubt the author would have trouble finding another job if this doesn’t pan out.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by star-castle on Thursday June 07, 2018 @12:39PM (#17257512)

I doubt that the svk guy had that problem either.

His problem was, instead, "I took a year off work to produce a VCS and then saw the throne taken by git. My work has been forgotten and nobody uses it--not even me."

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by theyinwhy on Thursday June 07, 2018 @12:53PM (#17257668)

That's the experience of 99.999% of all startups.

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Re:I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig by sincerely on Saturday June 09, 2018 @03:41PM (#17274619)

Thanks for clarifying, I see what you're saying

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