When the two men met for beers at a Seattle bar in 2005, each was in the midst of building a new programming language, trying to remake the way the world creates and runs its computer software. That's something pretty close to a hopeless task, as Bright knew all too well. "Most languages never go anywhere," he told Alexandrescu that night. "Your language may have interesting ideas. But it's never going to succeed."

Alexandrescu, a graduate student at the time, could've said the same thing to Bright, an engineer who had left the venerable software maker Symantec a few years earlier. People are constantly creating new programming languages, but because the software world is already saturated with so many if them, the new ones rarely get used by more than a handful of coders—especially if they're built by an ex-Symantec engineer without the backing of a big-name outfit.