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Comment by lifthrasiir | Hacker News Reader

Not explicitly mentioned in the guide, but Buzz has a garbage collector [1] (can also be inferred via a casual mention of upvalues). So it has more focus on scripting than static typing I guess, but the language design doesn't look so to me.

[1] https://buzz-lang.dev/reference/std/gc.html

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Static typing is orthogonal to scripting or GC.

English is not my native language, and "orthogonal concepts" always mean something along the lines of "mutually exclusive" in my head.

It is used to say that there isn't really a relationship between them.

Not at all, it means independent from each other. Like the x and y coordinates of a point in a plane: you can set one of them to the value you want and it won't affect the other. This only happens when the x and y axes intersect at 90°, hence the "orthogonal".

Good explanation. I first got confused by this colloquial use of orthogonal even though having done a course on vector spaces!

Yes, but "statically typed scripting language" is a quite unusual combination of words [1], and there seemed nothing to back up the "scripting" concept, so I thought it might be something more akin to Nim or Zig (i.e. "scripty system programming"), and it wasn't. That was a missing line of thought that I should have explicitly stated, sorry for the confusion.

[1] Especially when no type inference was mentioned.

Statically typed languages with a garbage collector are just as common as those without. So I don’t really follow why you’re surprised that this had a GC.

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