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Comment by rishav_sharan | Hacker News Reader

well Jai is probably the least interesting language for me as the others actually exist. When Jai ever gets released, only then I can see all its warts and glories.

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I mean it obviously exists. He livestreams coding on the language and in the language. Sure very few people can actually use it right now, but existence is not in question.

But existing for someone else, and existing where I can use it are two different things. I'm sure there are lots of cool tools and things that exist at big companies like Google (or more interestingly say the NSA) but for all my intents and purposes they don't because I can't interact with them.

A reverse corollary to Russell's Teapot? So what if there is a teapot orbiting Jupiter, I can't get it so it allows me no ability to serve tea. Therefore it might as well not exist!

Respectfully speaking, I don't think we need to get anywhere near some weird "reality is relative" argument here.

Just say it's not useful to you because you can't use it. No need to say it doesn't exist, even if it just doesn't exist "for you."

(As an aside, I think a lot of societal problems in the world today have roots in relativism and such -- so it's a bit of a bugbear.)

I understand that. However my comment was just a statement that the existence the person above me was implying was useful existence. As in we can all be excited about this new tool, or game, or whatever, but if we never get to use it, its usefulness is moot. So while the language certainly exists we can observe him working on it, and he could even create a game using it that would have some societal impact, the current usefulness of the language to anyone except him is as if it did not exist at all.

Of course you could make the argument that its mere existence and him highlighting certain aspects could have influences on other language designers... and wow am I going down a tangent spiral now...

Anyways: TL;DR reality is objective but words can have complex semantics

But that's a big deterrent for a lot of people. Odin, Zig, and the like are languages that can be used right now. Yeah, they're not mature yet, but you don't have to wonder what it is like to program in them, and you can start building familiarity with them today.

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