Not at all. Most languages out there are not backed by corporations and they are doing amazingly well.
- OCaml is mostly used and extended by Jane Street but it is still being actively changed by scientists and hobbyists.
- Rust is backed by a foundation but started off as a bunch of hobbyists.
Elixir is still not backed by a corporation and it enjoys a steady slow growth to this day. - F# wasn’t corporate-backed at the beginning as well.
- Zig is mostly the brain-child of a single person and is highly praised.
Examples abound. If anything, I’d claim the opposite: the more corporately backed a language is, the more it gets warped to the needs of the corporations that back it and that’s not a good thing.
One example: Golang is backed up by Google and it suffers a number of embarrassing incidents like elementary mistakes in its crypto and HTTP libraries.
Nobody can predict the future but if programming becomes strongly regulated down the line then yes, lack of corporate backing might be fatal. At the moment this isn’t a problem at all though.
Awesome and amazing tooling. Elixir, Rust and Zig are a shining example. It’s not enough your language to be really good (LISP, OCaml) but it also has to have very good package manager, task runner etc. (cargo for Rust, mix for Elixir). Python is hugely popular yet it suffers from basic lack of tooling to this day.
If you make your programming users’ lives easier then will flock to your language.
Nothing in particular except for something rather vague from me:
Watching Rust and OCaml showed me that some scientific (mostly mathematical and logical) training pays huge dividends. Some Rust core functions and 3rd party libraries utilized particular breed of state machines (finite state automatons I think) to optimize regexes and concurrent / parallel processing with crushing success. And others are starting to sit on top of those extremely solid foundations.
Just an opinion: a bit more formal training and higher education need to make a comeback to the professional programming. Otherwise everybody is reinventing the same half-broken wheel all the time.