>>>Would you really trust another company to duplicate that in a copy cat environment?
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>>Hi Rick. To be fair, FoxPro was orginally a copycat of Dbase, then far exceeded it. Yeah I know it took a few years.
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>Those were different times though when the level of complexity was very different than it is today.
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>I'm not saying that you shouldn't trust a small company - there are plenty of examples for small companies doing great work even on a large scale - but you do have to be careful. It's very easy to paint yourself into a corner going down that path with a strategic product you're going to build applications around. Especially when you're looking at a 'top level' development tool/language.

Back in the old days Waterloo University had an OS/Assembler compiler, and I think a Fortran one too, that way way outclassed what IBM had (which was the only game in town at the time (more or less)). They were probably about as 'small' as you could get.
I agree that one does have to be careful, but not so careful as to accept only the "big names".
I have no ideas where PERL and PYTHON and several other recently-in-the-news languages come from, but they seem to be doing an adequate job of keeping people happy and extolling their products.