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Comment by zheng | Hacker News Reader

From the about page

> We figured pretty much everybody knows JavaScript

Even with the implied "everybody" being "everybody that would be interested in joining our site", this is a poor assumption. Not everyone is a ninja-rockstar web developer. In fact, some of the best content on HN comes from people who most likely don't know JS. I get the idea for the site, but the description seems very naive.

(FWIW, I do know JS)

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I know javascript too, and i've been contributing, but I don't know much about Node.js apps, Express, Mongoose, MongoDB or Jade, so my contributions have been pretty meager.

I'm still not entirely convinced that it serves as an adequate social filter, however, and I agree it might be too technically limiting to lead to a diverse userbase, but as an experiment I think it's worth watching.

Well, it's not a poor assumption if the site is primarily content of interest to JavaScript developers. Which, given the self-selection, it will be.

I don't know JS, and really don't have any interest in that site, but it looks like an easy enough language to figure out whatever the trick to it is.

Famous last words. I'm not saying that JavaScript is a particularly difficult language to learn, but most people make the mistake of looking at it's syntax and then concluding that "well, it seems pretty similar to Java, I can't just start coding away instead of learning about the basics".

Can't the about page be improved with a pull request?

What language would you recommend, if you wanted to make something accessible for, say, teenagers who haven't even taken the perfunctory "Introduction to Control Structures In Blub" course yet? Javascript seems like a good guess for "language you might pick up just from everyday computer use." (Another two being, I think, Windows batch files, and Excel macros.)

I can't imagine how anyone would pick up bits of js just from everyday computer use. How many people even now the the "view source" button in their browser even exists? Excel and batch files / shell scripts I could see though.

Consider you'll probably lose lawyers like Grellas and a few others who contribute a great deal here (I think rayiner, and people in other disciplines (a few scientists here and there) who may not know programming but know their vertical better than most hackers and have a lot to contribute in that respect.

It's an interesting idea for some kind of expertise test to contribute to a public forum, but it will be very self-selecting too.

> (FWIW, I do know JS)

Assumption confirmed!

You don't need to be a ninja-rockstar web developer to know js. But more importantly, I think it would be useful to emphasize the fact that pull requests don't necessarily need to be about improvements to code.

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