I thought the whole budget was rather low compared to the total value that is to be created.
Sure, 100k for 1 language sounds odd, given that 200k was enough not only for 2 languages, but also the entire framework. Still, the overall price point is more than fair.
You have to take into consideration that Light Table aims to be specific; adding further languages will likely result in more efforts than merely adjusting an IDE a little bit.
Of course, the more popular language, the higher the value. $200k for a clojure IDE is certainly overvalued for the number of people using it, but $300k is way undervalued for python. Not sure about javascript; obviously it's popular, but it's unclear whether this ide supports anything but niche (non-browser) use.
Depending on how its Clojure support is implemented, LightTable may be usable for ClojureScript projects, and thus allow developers to target browsers and NodeJS (and other JS runtimes).
Do a search for "Pluggable Backend Infrastructure for ClojureScript, and Development of a Lua backend" and you should turn up a Google Summer of Code 2012 project which seeks to broaden the scope of the ClojureScript compiler. If that project is successful, and if LightTable supports ClojureScript, the IDE's reach may be greatly expanded in the relatively near term.
I'm not saying 300k is a lot of money for LightTable. Sure, it sounds fair.
I'm just saying they claim to be "highly extensible" and yet, support for a new language requires a development effort of 100k.
It's sad since I mostly code in ruby or scala, these languages won't be supported and I don't think anyone is going to make a 100k development effort to support them.
The fill-out-the-code-flow stuff is going to be -much- harder to do for python than for clojure, I suspect.
Just because it's highly extensible doesn't mean that beating the other language's VM into doing what's needed isn't going to require a bunch of effort.
it's not as if we were purchasing one language. It's a stretch goal, with python as the reward. The goal and the difficulty of implementation are not related.
Sure, 100k for 1 language sounds odd, given that 200k was enough not only for 2 languages, but also the entire framework. Still, the overall price point is more than fair.
You have to take into consideration that Light Table aims to be specific; adding further languages will likely result in more efforts than merely adjusting an IDE a little bit.