[peterpeppers]

Nah.

I think you may not understand their intent which is to bring innovation to programming language design.

Language design is one of those "hard" problems that most feel is meant for "rockstar developers" like Rich Hickey or José Valim.

To me, it appears that Repl.it is doing two things with this hackathon:

1. supporting existing language designers creativity

2. encouraging "regular" devs to try their hand at proglang design

[azhenley]

Based on my extremely biased view from HN, Reddit, and Twitter, it seems like nearly every dev has their own toy language project. The number of language announcements and compiler tutorials on HN is astronomical, several of which are from myself.

[compscistd]

But it’s not __approachable__, at least not to me. Seems like survivorship bias to point to nearly every dev with a toy language project. I might feel similarly if I finish nand2tetris

[searchableguy]

I think that's internet in general. HN has 30 slots which change upto 4-6 times a day. That's 120 slots and assuming only 5% of them are show HN: new programming language. It's vastly smaller than the number of software engineers that are produced every year.

That's in millions.

[azhenley]

I agree that it needs to be more approachable! That’s why I recently released a tutorial series, Let’s make a Teeny Tiny compiler: http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/teenytinycompiler1.html

Ironically enough, a lot of the criticism of my tutorial was that we have plenty of compiler tutorials already and don’t need any new languages...

[hhas01]

“Ironically enough, a lot of the criticism of my tutorial was that we have plenty of compiler tutorials already and don’t need any new languages...”

Change is Threat to the status quo.