alt Hacker NewsThe $LANG Programming Language
This afternoon I posted some tips on how to present a new* programming language to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46608577. It occurred to me that HN has a tradition of posts called "The {name} programming language" (part of the long tradition of papers and books with such titles) and it might be fun to track them down. I tried to keep only the interesting ones:
https://news.ycombinator.com/thelang
Similarly, Show HNs of programming languages are at https://news.ycombinator.com/showlang.
These are curated lists so they're frozen in time. Maybe we can figure out how to update them.
A few famous cases:
The Go Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=934142 - Nov 2009 (219 comments)
The Rust programming language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1498528 - July 2010 (44 comments)
The Julia Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3606380 - Feb 2012 (203 comments)
The Swift Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7835099 - June 2014 (926 comments)
But the obscure and esoteric ones are the most fun.
(* where 'new' might mean old, of course - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23459210)
Comments
the headline made me think somebody else came up with my idea. I wanted to a create a language whose name was langlang. to understand how to parse it, that would be the equivalent as a name to C, and the equivalent to clang would be langlanglang.
I considered the shorter name lang, but lang already has a meaning and I thought then in that world langlang might confuse people as to the actual name of the language, whereas since langlanglanglang is clearly needless overkill in a name, langlang and langlanglang would provide just the right amount readability and reinforcement as to the actual name of langlang.
This is a fun false positive :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34675259
Yikes, I tanked HN's performance by posting this! Probably because of loading all those old threads over and over.
I've moved the URL out of the link at the top, which seems to be helping for now.
(now I have to decide whether to go down another rabbit hole and fix that)
That reminds me, I really should blog my design ideas for my spiritual successor to Python....
I feel like there’s an Advent of Code challenge lurking here.
Very useful! Thanks for the addition.
So these are just static pages, not new entries for https://news.ycombinator.com/lists?
I did a Show HN for a language called Tsonic yesterday, which is a variant of TypeScript (all tsonic is valid typescript) requiring stronger typing which compiles to x64/ARM native code via .Net/NativeAOT. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46604308
It didn't appear in Show HN at all. Perhaps because another user posted it as a regular topic just a few minutes earlier, which drops off very quickly (within minutes) - but I think the issue is wider.
For a while now, I've felt that the new topics stream requires you to promote the topic outside of HN to be seen on HN - sometimes by adding a "Discuss on HN" link in the blog, or on social networks etc. The problem is quite fundamental: the "Show" link gets a small fraction of clicks. The "Show New" (two clicks away) probably gets tinier, miniscule fraction of clicks. The intersection of people who are interested in the project and those who have clicked "Show New" would be very nearly null. So upvotes will have to come from outside.
For a moment I thought there was actually a new language called $LANG, which would have been wonderful.