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Comment by caiocaiocaio | Hacker News Reader

Making a language is fun, and builds your skills. I'd rather work with a person who has made a bad language than someone who has never made one.

Don't make fun of people for making languages.

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I make languages and I LOLed. Self-awareness, good knowledge of CS history, and a huge heaping helping of humility are all key prerequisites to inventing a language that is even marginally less appalling than all of its predecessors. “You will FAIL” is about the best advice a nascent language designer can receive, and they should embrace it.

Also Obligatory:

http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-m...

I don't take this so much to be making fun of all people making languages as making fun of people thinking they will upend the existing zeitgeist of languages because though decades (nearly a century) of language designers have come before them, they have the key insight that those minds lacked.

Some day, that may become true. But the safe-money bet is on "no" for the vast majority of languages one will encounter in academia and industry. Most will fail to catch on, a few might be remembered, and the ones that succeed will do so because of forces unrelated to the zen of their design as much as the new ideas (or old ideas done right) they bring to the table.

(They share that in common with startup companies ;) ).

This checklist is, to my eyes, making fun of people who make fun of languages.

Well, if that's the case, I can do you one better.

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