The point I was making is for something to get enough traction, so that it would get active contributors who help mature the language, tools, etc.
I think there are only handful of people out there who can contribute in a meaningful way for a project like this. If they are consumed working on open source Swift or doing pull request on many things pushed by FB or Google or working contributing to existing projects like GHC, etc. Then the Alpaca project wont get the contributors it needs to show progress. If there is no progress, it falls into a vicious circle of no progress -> no traction -> no contributors -> no progress
The good news is that you don't need that big of a community for a language to do well. It does, of course, need to be big enough, but you don't need to compete too hard with the big corporation-backed languages to have your language community grow enough that it can sustain itself.
Of course, I guess I don't have any real data on it, so this is just my intuition based on observing various languages. So, you know, just my 2 cents.
I think there are only handful of people out there who can contribute in a meaningful way for a project like this. If they are consumed working on open source Swift or doing pull request on many things pushed by FB or Google or working contributing to existing projects like GHC, etc. Then the Alpaca project wont get the contributors it needs to show progress. If there is no progress, it falls into a vicious circle of no progress -> no traction -> no contributors -> no progress