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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

> Not sure why you see implementing a simple language to learn the underlying techniques as "artificially limiting" the project's potential.

Even a simple language like Hecl is used for real things in the real world, something I wouldn't have imagined when I started writing it. An implementation of Brainfuck will never be used for anything more than learning.

Which continues to be my point: learning's great, but why not learn and do something that has a tiny chance of developing into something big?

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You're assuming that every thing that people work on actually needs the potential to become "big".

What about the people that study klingon? Or Esperanto? Or Elvish?

You assume that a person cannot gain something by simply learning something that has no practical purpose. This isn't the case. By working on BF, someone might make some neuron connections that help them with logical thought with other projects, by breaking down logical thinking into very simplistic, basic symbols--completely removing "language" out of the equation.

You just don't know. :P

cough

"Elvish" doesn't actually exist. There's Quenya, or 'high' elvish and Sindarin, 'low' or 'gray' elvish.

cough

Carry on!

Then how about giving an example of somebody who had some benefit of learning Klingon, not related to Klingon as is?

The Klingon Dictionary is very good at explaining grammatical concepts. It made me interested in how language worked. After reading it I was able to understand a French grammar book and go from getting an E in my French GCSE mock exam to a B in the final a couple of months later. I went on to get a degree in French (which I never used but that's beside the point).

Specifically, some of the gutteral sounds used in Klingon are sounds that are used in real languages. If you're a native American-English speaker, these sounds do not exist in our language. If someone here is so dedicated to learning Klingon and Star Trek, it might open their ability to A) learn real languages easier, B) to pronounce many of the sounds used in those languages.

> You assume that a person cannot gain something by simply learning something that has no practical purpose

Actually, what I wrote, if you'd bother to read it, is: "Yeah, he learned something for sure, but that's pretty much all it can be." so don't put words into my mouth.

The point boils down to this:

* It'll probably never become big.

* That doesn't really matter, it's mostly for learning and for fun.

* But even so, why preclude that? <- this is all that is causing people to get their knickers in a knot over what I wrote.

> You're assuming that every thing that people work on actually needs the potential to become "big".

If you get that essentially for free, then why the hell not?

The effort you've expended to debate this will soon meet & then exceed the effort that went into the tracing JIT in question. When you reach that point, you'll have some soul searching to do.

You'd be annoyed too if people continued to misconstrue what you were saying in order to attack a strawman.

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