My first real exposure to programming was when I read a book called “Learning Perl” by Randal L. Schwartz. When I finished reading that book I realized that you can actually make a living by playing with a computer all day. I was blown away.

A decade later, I’m reminiscing about Perl and decide to look into Mr. Schwartz a bit. I realized that he really built a career around being an expert in Perl. That’s really interesting to me – he’s basically paid to be the best Perl programmer he possibly can be.

Yesterday I stumbled upon the Kit Programming Language, a language that “compiles” to C. Not a completely new concept, but an interesting one that seems to do it the right way in my opinion. The syntax is very C-like, but different enough to accomodate the new features that they have added. They’ve also implemented the compiler in Haskell, an interesting choice.

This has me thinking: What are the odds that Kit becomes a viable language? Will people try to become the Randal Schwartzes of Kit? There’s definitely an interesting career opportunity for someone here if they become the de-facto expert on Kit. They could write books, blog, be a consultant. But also, they could devote time and effort just for the language to fizzle out and never really take off.

This blog post is basically me saying “I wish I had the guts to take that kind of risk”. :)