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Comment by danellis | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed from HN headlines that there's an odd focus on what programming language something is written in. Often they'll take the form of "A <thing that is already common> written in <recently popular language>", rather than a real USP. It's especially odd from a community that places so much emphasis on the importance of a good pitch.

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I absolutely understand where you are coming from, but then again we are enthusiasts. It has some kind of relevance to us on the basis of being a novelty. Compare, "car engine runs on plant sap".

> a community that places so much emphasis on the importance of a good pitch

A subset do, for sure. But some of us are just playing around.

It's important for libraries. If you're writing in Go, a Java library doesn't help you much. Think of it as an easy way to qualify leads.

For apps, it matters less but you still have to think about how easy it is to modify. That's why we care about open source, right?

This is the wrong way around for that. It won't give you Java/Go interop.

> It's especially odd from a community that places so much emphasis on the importance of a good pitch.

A good pitch? Why does that even matter? 97% of these projects are for fun/as a learning exercise. If someone is interested those things, then they can check it out. If they aren't, then I guess the author misses out on a few GitHub stars. shrug

Think of it in terms of a typical 13 year old boy acting out, e.g. by climbing real high in a tree or doing tricks on his bike, to impress friends/girls. That's all this shit is, except it is targeted to a slightly different audience who will go out of their way to deny it. Not saying that applies to this particular project, just to your comment more generally.

Sometimes it is done just to learn, but it seems a bit silly to do it in public as it were.

I think it is closer to a 13 year old doing something that they have spent years practicing, such as a piano recital.

Sure, sometimes it is, undeniably. But given how immature in general this industry is--and that means both in terms of the span of its existence and in terms of the age of practitioners--it sure is suspicious how often X-that-has-been-around-forever-implented-in-Y comes up.

I mean how likely is it that "Hashtable/JS interpreter/JVM implemented in C" is going to be a big hit on HN? Not often. But since Go, JavaScript, and other insert new hotness language here are popular things somehow it's more interesting to retread old ideas with them. That's not the sign of a young master demonstrating his skill, it is the sign of an immature field that hasn't figured out how to distinguish what is new and important from what isn't.

It's unfortunate in particular for the people who do do these projects for fun or learning. These people have their work hijacked for a showoff culture's mutual backpatting.

A similar thing happens with browser technology. "Look at this amazing WebGL demo!" The thing is, the only interesting thing is that OpenGL can be accessed from JavaScript in the browser. After that, it's just lots of people rehashing demos that were done years ago, but people continue to be impressed because it's in a browser.

So we're all wasting our time. Some people find more interesting ways to do it than others.

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