Hacker News Reader

Comment by verdverm | Hacker News Reader

Bespoke languages are a hard sell and incur significant extra effort on the team building this.

1. People don't want to learn bespoke languages.

2. You have to build all the ecosystem tools for a language (compiler, docs, language-server, IDE integrations, dependency management)

Similar endeavors are WaspLang and DarkLang, which I have yet to see in the wild or (meaningfully) on HN. Better to use an existing language and focus on the value add.

I personally built something with similar value add (source of truth -> all the things). I've been through some of these pain points myself.

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof

The idea is CUE + text/template = <all the things> (not limited to APIs)

View on HN

It's this or writing openapi ymls... Even for people who know yml picking this up to define and write basic openapi definitions is much simpler than writing an openapi doc from hand, which is really painful

FastApi can generate the OpenApi yaml

not everyone writes Python, and not everyone starts code-first

There is a framework in every language I've worked with that will generate the OpenAPI schema for you. That you have to sketch the API in a language is not necessarily "code-first", it's just a different language than yaml/json, (go,py,js) without the implementation, just write the same types in example

New languages are at an even bigger disadvantage now with the rise of generative AI programming. A fancy new framework that is objectively better may actually be less productive because AI haven't been trained on it

There are some AI companies focusing on chatbots for developer projects that do better than using a general purpose LLM.

I think this will become more common and not really a barrier

All the game changing AI programming I've seen is coming from LLM... Regardless, there will always be a lack of training context for newer languages or frameworks.

Thanks for hof! Thinking of using it for a project. In what state is the project? I noticed that commits slowed down lately and I was wondering if you consider it stable at the moment and can be used as is.

You're welcome

I've been working on some AI related stuff lately, part of the reason for the slowdown. And actually using hof myself for real work

Code gen is pretty stable. I've been meaning to fix the TUI keybindings on mac before releasing the current beta. Was also hoping the the evaluator improvements would land upstream, but that hasn't happened yet...

I'll take a stab at releasing a new version this weekend, per your inspiration

Reply on news.ycombinator.com