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Comment by genzoman | Hacker News Reader

Is there such a thing as vapor languages? I feel like crystal and elixir are vapor languages.

If you are wondering why people seem a bit offended by your comment, it's because calling something vapourware has an implication almost of dishonesty or a con.

Crystal is real software that you can use today and build yourself and modify. It's doesn't make sense to accuse it of being vapourware.

I've always taken "vaporware" to refer to abandoned software.

This makes sense if you mean abandoned before release.

> "In the computer industry, vaporware (Brit. vapourware) is a product, typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is never actually manufactured nor officially cancelled."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware

Ha! It's even made it into Merriam-Webster's!

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vaporware

> "a computer-related product that has been widely advertised but has not and may never become available"

I'd hardly call a language with a fully-functioning compiler, a fairly complete standard library, which is being used in production in multiple (albeit small) companies as vaporware.

Crystal, I don't know, but how is Elixir vapor?

I honestly don't know a ton about it, but I see it mentioned in the same cool kid crowd of "rubyists" a lot.

Then I guess you just have a weird concept of what 'vapor' is in this context.

I believe you were thinking about so-called "hipster languages".

You should swing by https://elixirforum.com/ and see what's going on in the community. There are a lot of ELixir users who come from Java, OCaml, Haskell, Ruby, C#/F#, and further afield. It's a great language with a really sold niche in building systems with low latency, high availability, and good parallel data processing.

The language works. It has a full toolchain. It has Erlang interoperability.

If the entire Elixir project and team disappeared tomorrow, I could still write the same software and deploy it to the same (decades-old) BEAM VM.

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