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Comment by pawadu | Hacker News Reader

I found the study very shallow and superficial. For example, who cares how many people have starred a project on github? And why should I care how many lines "hello world" is in a language [1]?

I would rather see a discussion about performance, platform support, maintainability, governance and do on.

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[1] someone please create a new programming language where the empty file means "print hello world". Since you can't do any better than that it would once and for all put an end to this stupid benchmark.

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The author notes here (in the HN thread) that it's a very very cursory overview and there are plans to add more later given time. This could have been a blog post (or series of blog posts), so maybe the academic-paper feel was misleading.

While I'm not sure this content should be on the front page, it never was represented as a very deep comparison. I do admit that when I read it through I expected much more.

Also, how do you determine what libraries to use and what projects to invest in these days? Do you always do a full audit of every project? I know I don't have the time, so I use stars on a Github project just like one might use word-of-mouth. If a ton of people think a thing is useful, it's probably at least a little useful. Of course, that kind of thinking can be dangerous (see: javascript ecosystem), but a lot of the time, it's "good enough".

BTW, the paper does cover a tiny bit of information regarding differences in platform support when it covers how Swift deals with concurrency.

> I know I don't have the time, so I use stars on a Github project just like one might use word-of-mouth.

Up to a certain point, stars can be useful as it helps you discover projects other people have found of use. But saying project X is better than project Y because it has more stars? What does it show other than more people using X are on github or people using X a more prone to push the star button?

For reference, bootstrap has 100K stars, Linux has 40K...

Oh I definitely am not trying to imply you should use a project just because it has more stars -- maybe the right term was "hype" instead of word-of-mouth

Well... there is stuck....

https://stuck.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

> And why should I care how many lines "hello world" is in a language?

Because it's a good proxy for how good the language is for writing short, (often) throwaway programs.

I don't even think it's that. It's a good indicator of the language's ability to print a string constant, and nothing more.

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