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Comment by chikere232 | Hacker News Reader

The lack of such tooling is kind of a feature. Writing your own language is a great way to learn, but almost all of them shouldn't be used for anything serious

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Isn't this a self-fulfilling prophecy? Make it nearly impossible to create a new language with a sufficient amount of backing tooling, and sure, you'll find that nearly all new languages should not be used.

I had a similar thought chain. I came to the conclusion, though: You're always going to need people to learn how to build compilers and parsers and lexers. But for a language to be taken seriously, you kind of need a group of people. but from another language or languages. To be analogous, if John Carmack was an indie game developer tomorrow, we'd all buy his games probably. But if I publish a game tomorrow, how many of us are buying it?

Now, imagine five semi-core devs of Python get together and make a compiled language.

edited because i use a local llm on my phone for speech-to-text and i was testing with nearly white noise (fans and aerated water...) "FUTO"

The lack of such tooling may be precisely why many potentially great "indie" languages never succeed.

You’re massively overstating things there.

The reason indie languages never succeed is because without a strong corporate backer or other such commitment to longevity, the risk of doing anything serious in it only to have to rewrite the entire thing in the next new indie language is far too great. Or at least it should be for any seasoned engineer worth their paycheck.

Tooling helps prove that. But a strong standard library and a proven track record counts for so much more.

at some point you risk taking on maintaining the project, which may sound great to some people. i've worked places that bought a company to own a product we used that cost too much in maint contracts. I did cloud SaaS "1 week free demo" platform for that product so our company could recoup the cost of bringing on the maintenance burden in-house. I get the aversion to the risk of using new/untested/fringe products that you may be the only entity that actually can keep it running.

I'm not a "developer". I am a ham. I am not a hamster.

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