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Comment by cl8ton | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been in the programming trenches since early 90’s fluent in 5 languages at the production level and have to say I have never heard of the language 'Limbo’. I don’t fault GitHub one bit.

I suppose I could Google it and act like I know… naw

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I don't think the point was to complain about Limbo being missing. I think the point was to show that saying "Objective-C is the only language which can ever use .m as its primary extension" affects more than just the two languages listed earlier in the PR. The PR itself is about Mercury, after all.

Are people even reading the context of the rest of the PR?

I'm pretty sure there's no one with an encyclopaedic knowledge of programming languages. The industry is enormous, and just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean that it's irrelevant. "Niche" is not the same as "irrelevant".

And even if it WAS irrelevant and only important to a very small number of people, that doesn't mean it can be ignored.

>And even if it WAS irrelevant and only important to a very small number of people, that doesn't mean it can be ignored.

I don't follow. That sounds like the exact criteria for something to be ignored.

This really explains SV's homeless problem.

Given infinite time and developer bandwidth, sure. But we don't live in that world, so "do the work that gives the most benefit to the most users" remains the preferable real-world strategy.

Except that primary_extension does not serve any purpose.

From the thread it looks like there are over 6 languages that use .m as the filename extension (including both MATLAB and Mathematica which you may have heard of), meaning the whole concept of a unique "primary_extension" is kind of ludicrous.

I thought that Mathematica uses .nb extension?

Mathematica notebooks use .nb ; but Mathematica scripts generally use .m [1]

[1] https://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/tutorial/Mathemati...

True. But I'll bet you've heard of Matlab, which also uses .m, and is just as old as Obj-C. Matlab is everywhere in scientific computing.

Five languages across two decades?

Stand back, gents! This one is a champion!

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