Hacker News Reader

Comment by kiraken | Hacker News Reader

Don't we already have more than enough programming languages? I looked through the intro and this language introduces nothing new. Your time would have been better wasted on building a framework for an already established language. Sorry for putting you down, consider it tough love

View on HN

A man needs to own up to his mistake, i found all your points to be valid, and i hope that the developer of the language to excuse my rushed judgment. It's always good to know that there are people here that could set me straight when i'm mistaken, and in a polite way too. My apologies again

Your comment was actually pretty good because it spawned other very positive comments. We really like them all :-)

Not even close. There is an incredible amount of room for innovation and research in programming languages. You do not have to learn this or any of them and can continue to program in whichever language is at the peak of commercial success at the moment.

But it is important that we continue to try new things and make progress in this area.

Unfortunately this particular project does not seem to push many boundaries.

> Don't we already have more than enough programming languages?

No.

> I looked through the intro and this language introduces nothing new.

Its individual features aren't unique. The combination of them in one language seems to be somewhat new. What language do you see that it is redundant with?

Some people build programming languages as a learning exercise.

EDIT: And actually, having looked at it, this is no learning exercise, but a pretty cool language. There are few languages with type inference, high-level syntax, and compile to (supposedly) efficient binaries.

It has the syntax of a dynamic language, type inference, interfaces with C easily and compiles to native code. Is there a long list of languages with those features that I'm unaware of? Nimrod springs to mind.

Sounds very similar to Go, though.

Haxe

> Your time would have been better wasted on building a framework for an already established language

Don't we already have more than enough frameworks for established languages? :\

We have far more frameworks than we do languages, also there is a ton of knowledge to be gained by going through the steps of designing and implementing a programming language.

Programming languages in the modern sense are different to programming languages of, say, 20 yrs ago. If a language sits atop the JVM or generates Javascript, it's a "new programming language" in the modern sense but probably wasn't considered one previously. And nowadays, a "programming language" needs a visual IDE or plugin, rather than just a syntax, to be considered more than just a toy.

In a thread on hacker news recently someone brought up the "value of art":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8612359

I agree. We have tons of programming languages but if anything, this can exist as "Art" or study.

As a picky individual, I prefer this variation of languages over a few but established ones. It takes an hour to fully learn another new programming language, and it adds more excitement and comfort to programming.

Even if it were just for the grammar definition and the fun, it would not be wasted time...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com