Comment by thegeomaster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thegeomaster | Hacker News Reader

I'm not going to give out my email address in order to try out your language, sorry. Your EULA is a big turn-off as well. In this day and age, with so many niche programming languages popping up, I think it's going to be hard to gain a following with a proprietary compiler that you have to sign up to even download.

More to the point, I think your site could do a much better job on describing what's actually unique about this.

For example, I'm not convinced that the `_OnBreak`/`_OnComplete`/`_OnEmpty` machinery is useful enough to be part of a language. A bigger example where these features come in handy would be helpful to understand them.

Just skimming the highlights and examples page, it looks very similar to C++. So I think it could use some side-by-side examples to show how it makes ordinary programming easier/more readable/etc.

The Quick Start guide is a bit obtuse and feels incomplete. I'm having trouble understanding some features, and I feel the standard library is underdocumented---for example, I couldn't find what `.WSNL()` does, and it's used for your MIME type parsing example.

I apologize if I'm sounding a bit harsh; I'm trying to provide some constructive criticism here. I appreciate how hard it is to get something out the door and I wish you the best of luck.

I'll explain why there's a EULA and write another comment for the rest

At the point that it was clear we're going to have a usable compiler I asked my entire team what license we should release this under. Absolutely everyone had a problem with each and every open source license. The more we talk the more apparent that none of us wanted to wake up one day to find out a trillion dollar (possibly cloud related) company took our code and want to compete with us. We don't want embrace, extend, and extinguish to happen to this project if we could help it. So we settled on a EULA (which very likely will change at 1.0) that says you can learn for free which lets face it, is the only thing people would want to do in its present state

Figuring out a license is in the set of bare minimums I would look for in evaluating a language. I mean no offense in saying this, but I give a team which can't come to an accord on this basic thing very low odds of getting a language to 1.0.

The language field is very crowded. I'm all about new languages, I wish each and every one success and yours is no exception.

If it's going to succeed, you'll have to beat people over the head with it. The current situation won't reach escape velocity. Good luck.

Why do you think someone would bother to steal your code? Is this that revolutionary or are you delusional?

Usually I don't reply to rude comments but why would someone bother to steal zig and call it zen? https://zen-lang.org/ja-JP/docs/ch04-defer-errdefer/

No idea. As someone learning Zig currently and finding it quite pleasant, it disappoints me to see that happening.

But I guess it depends on what your goals are. If you want this language to be used by as many people as possible, you want to remove any obstacles to that, and a sign-up wall is a big one. You also have to consider the competition. I can go to my package manager and download compilers and runtimes for probably over 200 languages right now without having to submit any information about myself - I did it for Zig the other day. If your language and compiler are so mind-blowing that I should be glad to subject myself to the friction I have to go through to use yours instead, you really need to sell that to me with more than, as mentioned in another subthread, a promise of ambiguous features not found in other languages.

So free your code. Sell it to me as much as possible on the web site with all of its amazing capabilities and features and libraries. And if some company rips it off and passes it off as their own thing, make hay from it - write up a blog post about how the nasty big evil company stole the work of a plucky li'l FOSS team, but you're just going to keep plugging away and improving your code regardless. Then post it to HN. You'll get updoots through the roof and plenty of sympathetic new eyes on the project.

They seem to have a good write up to explain that: https://zen-lang.org/zig/

Also: forking /= stealing

You may want to check out the official statement [1] from the Zig foundation as well. Even though forking is not necessarily stealing, what they have done seems more accurately described as stealing.

[1] https://ziglang.org/news/statement-regarding-zen-programming... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24481142 )

Not really. Like, I would't use Zen personally and it's fair for Zig to highlight their concerns, but still none of this is stealing, and seems more like a petty disagreement, the cause of many forks on other projects in history.

> forking /= stealing

I think many people just fundamentally don't understand sharing or friendly coexistence. The drive to dominate and control is sooo maladaptive for society but very widespread.

You do understand that this makes your PL dead right from the birth, right?

Because you can change your license over time, you could release < 1.0 versions under a non-commercial license. See answers here (and in the linked duplicate question): https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4875/open-sou...

Especially in a pre-production state, it's unlikely that anyone will want to use this commercially anyway. It'll eliminate a big barrier to any adoption you're hoping to get.

> you can learn for free which lets face it, is the only thing people would want to do in its present state

Deciding to learn something in the first place is a question of how I want to use my limited time. I don't think I want to learn something with a presently-bad EULA that might change arbitrarily in the future.

It's totally fine that your team wants to keep this project close to you, it is your work and copyright privileges after all. You don't have to be open source if you don't want to. [1] Don't let anyone tell you what to do with your own work.

Just don't be surprised when you find that nobody's interested in it.

[1] I do think it's a bit hypocritical to require people to be "a part of the community" to download the thing when the license doesn't resemble a community or copyleft license. This is no different than downloading from the Oracle Download Center.

I get where your coming from but do you have an example of this happening for a programming language? I can’t think of any language that a company tried to extend and was successful with it. Its not a SaaS offering so the value add is very low for a company to try and take over development.

> I think it could use some side-by-side examples to show how it makes ordinary programming easier/more readable/etc.

That's a fantastic idea. I'll focus to improve this by the next release. Do you want short side by sides or real code examples? I'm worried that short ones may look contrive which is probably why you don't think it's useful? But I'm not certain people would look at anything that isn't short

Correct. I wasn't sure if I'll rewrite the reader class so I only used it in the example program section. The standard library is pretty nonexistent. We didn't want to make the language for only ourselves so we thought we should launch sooner rather than later

> I think your site could do a much better job on describing what's actually unique about this.

In another comment I mentioned that listing features tends to be ignored. Do you have any suggestions on how to counteract it? Maybe your side by side suggestion is ideal https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32460252

> In another comment I mentioned that listing features tends to be ignored.

I can see where you're coming from, it might be different from person to person. I personally would've been happy to read through a short feature list highlighting the most interesting ideas that the language introduces. For example, you mention automatic memory management without reference counting and garbage collection, which sounded interesting but wasn't specific enough for me to figure out what's unique. In another comment I saw that you expanded on it and mentioned it tracks lifetimes across scopes, which then sounds super interesting. But I didn't find where to learn more about it.

> Do you want short side by sides or real code examples?

I think short examples can do the trick, if they are not toy examples but can work as part of a bigger program, if that makes sense. Coming to think of it, ideally it would be best to have an actual program written in the language. That's what I usually do to feel out a new programming language---seek out a codebase written in it and read through. So if you have something like that, maybe you could showcase features using small snippets from the program itself, maybe side-by-side with equivalents in a well-known language.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com