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Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

This is such a bummer of a file that incorrectly assumes that the only valid goal of a new language is to achieve widespread adoption.

I know its en vogue to turn up our noses at "X at Y lines of Javascript", but programming is actually a pretty fun and neat thing to do, and its okay to create something even if its not particularly groundbreaking or commercially viable.

This is a bad language, and you should feel bad for inventing it.

I can't help but imagine the person who penned this sentence also routinely tells children that their macaroni artwork could use more symmetry.

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I think you might be missing the tone here. The checklist is intentionally overcritical and self-contradictory. The idea here--in my reading at least--is to poke fun at people who bash new programming languages by reducing their criticisms to a thoughtless checklist.

I think you're taking it too seriously..."X is bad and you should feel bad" is a popular meme that originated in Futurama:

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/your-musics-bad-and-you-should...

I'm aware that it's a meme, but that doesn't change the connotation of the phrase.

It's like you willingly got trolled...the post is a joke, and you knew it, but you still got bummed and made ominous assumptions about the person who penned a silly meme regurgitation. I don't understand.

c'est l'Internet.

I don't understand.

I think I finally do. For a long time I would see posts like GP's on 4chan and wonder if someone is really making them with a straight face unironically, or if it's part of some master troll orchestrated by a grand ruseman. For a while the grand ruseman theory seemed more believable, but seeing a normal person make such a comment on HN makes me think that perhaps most such posts are really made by normal people which, perhaps paradoxically, actually restores a bit of my faith in humanity. I mean, compared to the idea of people with nothing better to do than orchestrate stupid posts on 4chan of all places.

Sure it does. It suggests the person who penned it had a sense of humor rather than suggesting they are as much of a macaroni art critic as you imagine.

I cannot agree more, especially reading the history of T by P. Graham, a language I have never heard of before or written a line in, but whose history I find extremely interesting from a developers perspective.

The whole "X at Y lines" argument is the same as saying "I created an OS in language X in two lines of code" by writing:

  Import OS.*;
  OS.Run();

Checkmate, one line.

  Import OS.*; OS.Run();

Compile error: only the full sequence ";\n" ends a statement.

  for(;
  ;
  )
  {
      print "I don't like your compiler.";
  }

Paul Graham is not the author of the piece you mention, it's Olin Shivers.

I was mistaken at first but then I read a fragment which said "and then I went to write scsh" which made it obvious who was the author. I wonder how people can still be mistaken after seeing this (do they assume PG wrote scsh?).

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