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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

I think existing programmers sometimes forget that there's more people who /will/ program than who /do/ program. They have existing biases: towards extra tokens, separation of concerns by separating technologies rather than components, and other newer concepts that they legitimately do find strange.

People making programming languages are much better suited by targeting non-programmers: existing devs are often simply not their audience.

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"People making programming languages are much better suited by targeting non-programmers: existing devs are often simply not their audience."

In this case I'd argue it would be better for non-programmers to learn JavaScript before a language which compiles to it.

I agree with that: these languages often don't have devtools, so they have to look at the compiled output to fix bugs. This makes for an unpleasant learning experinece.

Once these tools fix the DevTools situation they'll be a lot more useful.

Imba is still lacking when it comes to devtools, but it does have full support for source mapping, and the sublime text plugin includes inline error messages from the compiler.

I get a little confused when people say they "compile" x scripting language into y scripting language.

Are you trying to be snarky or are you actually confused? Check out the wikipedia article on Transpilers for info on source to source compilers.

I know. Not trying to be snarky at all. Why don't people call stuff by it's names??? Transpiling, not compiling.

Maybe it looks like I'm nitpicking... If it got across like that, sorry. Not my intention at all.

What would you call it other than "compiling"?

Transpiling, as said above. Or maybe transpiling is compiling. I think I'll get out of it more confused than going in.

I like to view transpiling as a specialization of compiling. Even if you try to make the distinction between high-level input -> low-level output, in the end it feels like the language matters much less than how the generated code is designed. Most "transpilers" end up using the bare minimum number of features for the target language and staying constrained to a pretty low-level part of that language. For example, languages that transpile to JavaScript tend to target asm.js, which really doesn't look anything like the JavaScript that real people write. Getting bogged down in naming differences when the overall process is pretty much identical is just ignoring the big picture in my mind.

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