As chuck McM said, start looking for a problem, rather than an idea but i would like to add this caveat:

1) Look at the background of you 3 guys, and list out problems which were being worked around in the areas of your business development or private equity or the domain of your phd friend.

There is a much higher probability of you guys having domain expertise in the areas you have been exposed to in the past, and a lot of business contacts as well - and solving a problem in those areas means that you will be able to address problems you have personally faced before - through a combination of software and services.

Note that there is no dearth of problems to be solved, but problems you have faced before personally can be a much more fruitful area for automated solutions.

Read wodehouse and watched Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister to learn english in the 80's

Assembly was always an option, though a painful one.

I Second that. A Fantastic book which inspired me to go into science.

No Asimov, the greatest writer of books on General Science for the public?

Damn. It's always nice to see things i was working towards 15 years ago, now coming into fruition.

:)

A package manager is generally not part of the language per se and should not be part of the language, but rather be part of the tooling ecosystem around it. Don't get me wrong. A de facto package manager is extremely important for any major language - and it's high time someone in the C++ community builds and promotes one. It just doesn't belong in the spec.

I do know of at least one: Microsoft's NuGet now supports C++ packages.

Something tells me that isn't the answer folks are looking for.

Great. I have been streem-ing for more than 15 years now. :-)

IronPython and IronRuby never really had corporate backing - and the few resources devoted to them had been moved away fairly quickly.

Thus their fate today.

The difference, this time, seems to be high-level policy and a complete change of direction of the entire developer division.