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Comment by staticassertion | Hacker News Reader

I am always kind of surprised when I go to a landing page for a language and there isn't any actual code. This is one of my biggest complaints about the rust language page, it feels crazy to me that there's no code and I think this is just a ridiculous choice (and I know this has been brought up before).

The old page had a built-in sandbox. Go used to have a more "Front and center" sandbox too but at least it's there if you scroll down https://go.dev/

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> I am always kind of surprised when I go to a landing page for a language and there isn't any actual code.

So, you're not surprised that this Om page has an extensive section called "Examples", right? https://www.om-language.com/#language__examples__

I didn't scroll that far, and I shouldn't have to.

There is code, search for 'examples'.

It concludes by implementing a fold:

   define
   {
       [Fold]<- {
           rearrange
           {
               rearrange
               {
                   dequote
                   choose
                   quote Result
                   pair pair pair {[Fold]<-} Function Result Remainder
                   Remainder
               }
               {Result Remainder}
               dequote Function Base <-[terms] Source
           }
           {Function Base Source}
        }
   }
   {
       [Fold]<- {[literal]<-} {} {1 2 3}
   }

great example! as someone who writes a Fold function every day, this explains the power of the language very well. ;)

As is clearly explained on the web page, this is not a programming language for everyday tasks, it's an early stage proof of concept that can be used to explore how computer science might be expressed in unusual ways.

Implementing fold would be something of a milestone in such a language.

i'm really not trying to be snarky or anything, but right at the top of the om page it describes the language as concatenative and homoiconic. without searching that or asking an llm, do you know what those terms mean? or what fold is?

could be there's nothing wrong with the page and you're really just not the audience for it. hacker news has many currents, most of which don't interest me, and that's fine, i don't feel the need to weigh in on everything.

One time, this annoyed me so much that I made a website.

https://anaminus.github.io/langding/

om would fall under "Yes, must scroll".

Fascinating! It almost seems like the more popular a language is the less likely it is to have syntax on the landing page.

Popular languages don’t have to sell themselves anymore. No one goes to rust or pythons website to see if they would enjoy the syntax

There is code. Small examples start halfway down the page, and there's one 20-line example. Not much, but it's not accurate to say there's none.

It would be helpful to see any kind of motivation for the project though. Anything at all.

On my phone that code is about 250+ lines down, probably 4-5 screens down.

It basically doesn't exist as far as marketing is concerned.

So it just needs a TOC.

No, it needs a 5 line code snippet above the fold.

Or it can have a TOC. It only takes one tap.

marketing isn't concerned, it's an experiment in programming languages. the attention of someone who needs to eyeball the syntax before they understand how to read it has zero value to a project like this.

splashing code examples at the audience encourages superficial assessments of the language.

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