[xwowsersx]

The general negativity and tone of "tell me precisely what the point of this is right now!" in the comments here deviates so completely from the spirit of play, tinkering, and experimentation inherent in the hacker ethos, at least as I see it, and I'm really disappointed to see it here. You can have your qualms with this language, you might feel personally overloaded by languages at the current moment, maybe you even have legitimate questions about the intended audience of this language — fine. None of those feelings or questions justify the kind of rude, interrogatory "How dare you do this! Show me why I should care!" attitude reflected in many of the comments here.

[lhorie]

Adding my two cents of positivity:

I love seeing language projects that implement their own compiler backends. There really aren't enough of these around. Anything that helps bridge the knowledge gap between newbies and production grade compilers is a net positive in my books.

And extra brownie points for writing it in C. Think whatever about memory safety and language age but C code is abundantly explicit about what's going on with the code, which is something I really appreciate when approaching some new code to learn stuff.

[__loam]

I think it's pretty fair to ask the question of "why should I use this?" I don't think it's rude to ask what this offers over other systems languages like Rust, Nim, Zig, or Go. All of those languages have been around for a while now and have some ecosystem and inertia. This language is claiming to bring back the joy of programming but frankly it looks like another c like language. Do we really need that?

It's an impressive project for one person to make but if we're talking about it as a prospective general purpose language, that naturally invites comparisons and criticism. I haven't read the comments but I think most people have good intentions when they share their view on this project and aren't personally attacking the author.

[xwowsersx]

I have no problem with genuine questions like "Who do you think should or would use this?" That's not what I'm addressing.

[__loam]

Most of the discussion here is fairly constructive or supportive. There are snarky and sarcastic ass holes everywhere on the internet, and especially on hackernews. The best thing you can do as a creator is learn to take the constructive feedback and ignore the noise of sad people just trying to take a pot shot at your expense. I don't think we need to explicitly call that out here.

The author mentioned in another comment that he was designing the language to use what he likes from other languages and for writing his own game engine. That's a really cool project, and I think he would get a more positive response to his language if he was up front about that on his website. The joy of programming is pretty subjective and the use cases he presents are basically possible to do in any turing complete language.

I saw another language project on hacker news about neo haskell that was some random guy trying to become the benevolent dictator for life of the haskell ecosystem without really talking to anyone in that community. I think stuff like that makes people jaded and cynical (and rightly so in some cases) when folks make overbroad claims about tools that have well established alternatives or existing communities. Not trying to excuse the behavior but that might be part of why people are biased to be negative in cases like these.

[tome]

> neo haskell that was some random guy trying to become the benevolent dictator for life of the haskell ecosystem

No, he was trying to become BDFL of his own project! And why not?

[__loam]

His own project was seeking to replace haskell lol

[corethree]

What also pisses me off is fake excessive positivity. If there are genuine things that are bad or negative people should feel free to voice those opinions even if it hurts someones feelings.

Facts and truth are more important then feelings. We shouldn't lie or be fake just to cater to someones feelings. Ultimately the truth is better in the long term.

Because this is a real thing. Who would use this when there are other more popular languages out there that have basically the same syntax? What does this language excel at above all others ? If the author wants his language to have any chance or shot at real success he needs to address this.

If we just took your advice and didn't be negative in the spirit of "tinkering", "play" and "experimentation" then ultimately that advice is more poisonous than the negativity. You need to identify and test your product for it to be successful. Your advice is to blind him.

Seriously just looking at the web site my first thought was why wouldn't I just use python?

[throwaway17_17]

To answer your last question first: Nature seems to be an ahead of time compiled language with direct memory access vs. python’s being an interpreted strictly GC’d language. So the immediate conclusion would be, you would not use Python in a performer critical environment, i.e. game engine development for modern 3d video games (an area the author has commented several times is a personal use case).

Also, you are assuming some desire by the language designer to have the language be successful (whatever that may mean). One of the stated goals to raise user’s “joy” when programming. I think taking on a challenging problem and crafting a personally desired solution, and doing so well from a brief look at the implementation, is certainly something, that sounds like the kind of activity that could provide a great source of enjoyment/fulfillment/…. So a programmer developing a language they like and enjoy, then wanting to share that makes sense.

The main negatives I have seen expressed are ‘there are already too many programming languages, why add another, that’s a waste’ or ‘what is going to sell this language, the docs don’t make a big sales pitch’, etc. I have not seen any real criticism addressing the semantics and other than some mentions of significant white space vs. curly braces, I haven’t seen criticism related to the syntax.

So, if your negatives, which are so much more important than feelings or if the truths you referenced are substantive criticisms of the actual artifact, I would say lay them out and maybe have a conversation. But I don’t see anything substantial, just complaints about a person pursuing something they choose to pursue and making, what seems to be, a darn good effort in the process.

[corethree]

Skimming the website... that's not what I see. He'd do well to make what you said more evident. If it's for game engine development how does it access the GPU?

When I see the "Joy" of programming, honestly I don't care. Pretty much nobody cares. Just because someone says it's joyful doesn't make it joyful. This is essentially what he's saying: "Hey buddy use my generic product that exists in a thousand different forms everywhere, it makes you joyful"

That's why nobody cares. He did well by having examples of the code, he didn't do well by not stating where it excels above other languages. I left thinking it's like python with types.

>So, if your negatives, which are so much more important than feelings or if the truths you referenced are substantive criticisms of the actual artifact, I would say lay them out and maybe have a conversation. But I don’t see anything substantial, just complaints about a person pursuing something they choose to pursue and making, what seems to be, a darn good effort in the process.

If there's enough un-substantive criticism of a product it points to ineffective communication. If everyone is taking a shit on the product then it doesn't even matter if the product is good, it's still shit.

There's your conversation. If you want people to listen and have a conversation you need to effectively communicate. This site spawned a lot of criticism, so that's a problem stemming from the person STARTING the conversation.

You see what I wrote? Sounds mean right? But, personally I think it's better and more real than any advice you've given him.

[weiwenhao]

I'm not entirely sure if Hacker News scoring system includes a boost for comments, but it seems that controversy and criticism are not necessarily bad things. They may actually help keep the post on the front page for a longer period of time.

[raytopia]

Wish there were online communities without that attitude and snark but it seems nearly everywhere.

[gorjusborg]

My guess is that the snark comes from unhappiness, which strongly correlates with percentage of time spent online, which strongly correlates with probability one posts.

[yungporko]

this is most responses to anything anybody makes on here, it's a reddit-tier cesspit.