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Comment by teiferer | Hacker News Reader

I gave it an honest look for 5 minutes and after still only having found a 3-line hello world I gave up (and came here to complain).

It's great that you have all that philosophy behind it, all sounded great, but if you don't show me a compelling example in the first minute or two, not even in tutorial, then you'll fail to capture my interest.

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Example pony applications: https://github.com/ponylang/ponyc/tree/main/examples

Playground: https://playground.ponylang.io/

They're on HP https://www.ponylang.io/ unfortunately the article link points to /discover/

Sure, if I go dig deep I'll find that. But I was talking about the sales pitch. Once it's necessary to go click links in a levels-down comment in the HN discussion section, you've already lost most folks.

They aren't selling anything, and they didn't write their documentation with HN in mind ... the OP is probably not associated with them.

>they didn't write their documentation with HN in mind

The programming language documentation wasn't written for an audience primarily composed of programmers? That would be an odd choice.

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The OP is definitely not associated with them. Just a curious actor model enthusiast.

I personally found the descriptions of the concepts and ideas more illuminating and interesting than a code example. If you're only looking to nitpick the superficial syntax, kinda like judging a person's character by how they dress, then I guess you're not in the target audience for this documentation.

It's entirely possible to not want to look at an ugly person without casting aspersions as to their character.

I don't care about syntax. The concepts were too abstract though. I'm sure these descriptions make sense if you already know what it's about, but in that case you are hardly the target audience..

And you cannot have both at the same time, because...?

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dang recently pointed me to the HN guidelines. I think this one applies here:

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

This is by definition a critical comment which teaches something, ie if you don't present viewers with pertinent information about your project, they cannot take an interest in your project. I think it should be noted that both GP and another few highly rated comments are making this exact point.

"by definition"? It's apparently something you believe, but it certainly isn't a tautology. And I don't think that's an accurate characterization of that comment, at all.

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