*At least for the people who send me mail about a new language that they're designing, the general advice is: do it to learn about how to write a compiler. Don't have any expectations that anyone will use it, unless you hook up with some sort of organization in a position to push it hard. It's a lottery, and some can buy a lot of the tickets. There are plenty of beautiful languages (more beautiful than C) that didn't catch on. But someone does win the lottery, and doing a language at least teaches you something.* Dennis Ritchie <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie> (1941-2011) Creator of the C <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_language> programming language and of Unix <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix> But then being non popular does not mean that you are not very useful.