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Comment by evincarofautumn | Hacker News Reader

I like writing languages, but I really don’t understand what possesses someone to write a new language that’s essentially a syntactic reskin of the same set of imperative/OO features found in most popular languages. We don’t need new syntax—we need new semantics.

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It's been around since <2003, so it's hardly new. It's primary purpose was a high performance scripting language for game engines.

That being said I agree with you wrt new semantics and I would love to see a practical programming language that has dependent types.

It's a flyweight language which makes it suitable for embedded devices. It brings some modern language conveniences to the embedded world; (eg. it's the language electric imp uses for the IoT devices: http://electricimp.com/)

It's a relatively (10+ years) old language, and it is innovative in that it combines a scripting language with ref counting as opposed to garbage collection. How many other scripting languages do this?

> How many other scripting languages do this?

Python, Perl, PHP, and TCL? Not really that innovative....

Nope, all those languages are garbage collected.

CPython uses reference counting.

Links:

http://www.quora.com/How-does-garbage-collection-in-Python-w...

https://docs.python.org/2/library/gc.html

Reference counting is a form of garbage collection, although a very bad one. And I don't know about the others, but Python does use reference counting, although it combines it with another garbage collection algorithm to avoid some of reference counting's most egregious failures (it not being able to collect cycles).

Reference counting isn't even very bad; for certain patterns of allocation, it's even optimal. However, for certain people, having to manually deal with cycles is enough to switch to a mark-and-sweep type collection mechanism.

See: Apple opting for ARC over mark-and-sweep GC.

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