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Comment by 7thaccount | Hacker News Reader

I'm not aware of any better place for people to chat about programming languages including esoteric stuff like APL where someone actively developing the main commercial offering and another writing an open source alternative are actively contributing to the conversation and explaining how low level operations work.

I've seen plenty of experts here on stuff like Prolog, Lisp, Forth, Smalltalk (Alan Kay has posted on here), tons on Java, Python, R, C++, Julia...it goes on and on.

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I think the point is the signal to noise ratio is poor. But it's less bad than everywhere else I find.

There are a surprising amount of that on various discord servers.

I chat about esoteric languages on the Godot engine discord server once in a while.

Right, but that's very specific, and frankly Discord makes terrible public forums.

HN excels as a general purpose forum for technical discussions relating to computer science.

The quality of actual technical discussion on HN is not much better on average than any programming or technical subreddit in my experience, if they are well moderated. It shouldn't be surprising that the most technically adept people here also tend to post the least often.

The biggest difference is HN is strongly anti-humor, primarily because of the weird pathology the culture here has about Reddit and appearing "mainstream." But the lack of memes here doesn't make the rest of the content better, rather it tends to result in aggression, knee-jerk contrarianism and overconfident assertions in ignorance becoming low effort virtue signals instead.

HN is just barebones. I don’t think there’s anything about it that specifically makes it better than anything else other than tech articles float to the top.

> There are a surprising amount of that on various discord servers.

I'm never surprised anymore by how much productive discussion is entombed in Discord servers, just sad. Servers are hidden from the public, not web-searchable, barely searchable internally, horrible threading, notification hell, proprietary software, zero data ownership - it could hardly be a worse public discussion forum if it tried. Which makes sense because it was designed to be something else. Sigh... got a link to any of these servers that have better discussion than HN?