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Comment by mise_en_place | Hacker News Reader

I really hope this won’t be taken the wrong way, but why are these people always fighting the last war? Brendan Eich was already doing this in the 90s when developing JavaScript.

I disagree with a lot of what Jonathon Blow says, but he’s correct when he said that even the most trivial of projects are regarded with awe, as if they’re some insane and innovative skunkworks project. There are problems that need solving, that are in dire need of solving, but nobody seems to care about them. What we end up with is more and more bloated frameworks and languages that nobody uses after a week.

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Because it's fun. Not everything is a war. I just want to make a language that I would enjoy using. I don't exactly expect it to reach the TIOBE top 10.

There is an infinite number of problems out there that "need" solving. The thing is I don't really care about those problems. They'd have to pay money to get me to even think about them. These "trivial" projects though? Those provide me with plenty of intrinsic motivation. I like working with the unseen infrastructure that everybody takes for granted.

What was Brendan Eich doing that is covered in this article?

LISP in the browser, although he used Self instead of Newspeak for objects and Scheme as the blueprint for LISP. For systems language LISP, there are already many languages available for BEAM, like LFE and Elixir.

This isn't about Lisp in the browser though, it's about high-level low-level programming (to borrow the name from Daniel Frampton <https://www.steveblackburn.org/pubs/theses/frampton-2010.pdf>).

What do you consider in dire need of solving?

webGL and WASM for one thing. Of course it is dependent on the implementation, but it seems to have abysmal performance.

In line with that, there needs to be a good FOSS replacement of Unity. I know Godot exists but more open game engines will help.

Those are just a few off of the top of my head.

The problems that need "solving" in this space are 99% politics. Making something become a standard and/or popular is a fundamentally different task from making something good.

The answer to your earlier question, of course, is that—to some people, anyway—trying to make something good is far more satisfying than trying to make something popular.

WASM performance seems mostly fine for most applications [1]. Certainly better than Python or Ruby. Maybe running in the browser is a bit of a different story, given that it has to go through JS to manipulate the DOM, but I don't think this is a problem that can be solved with more developers.

[1] https://00f.net/2023/01/04/webassembly-benchmark-2023/

“… all human progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

What’s old can easily become new again if a technology change in one corner of the system propagates outward, modifying the constraints & requirements on other components.

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