Ask HN: Hobby programming language, waste of time?

1 points by _RPM 8y ago ↗ HN

I've been working on a functional language for a couple years now in my spare time. I generally enjoy, although I'm aware that I'm not exactly creating any assets that would have monetary value in the future. I sometimes question if there is a point to this. One thing I know is that it's not 1990 where people are writing web applications in C. We have many dynamic memory safe languages like Python, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, etc, so there is no need for yet another dynamically typed language.

2 comments

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tony-allan 8y ago ↗

Keep going, finish the project, publish it on Github and then post back here so anyone interested can go and have a look.

It may become popular or it might end up with a single programmer. It doesn't matter. Just do it!

gradschool 8y ago ↗

It's not a waste of time if you enjoy it and are learning something from it without any unrealistic expectations about where it might lead. I agree with you that there isn't any shortage of so called memory safe languages (if by that you mean languages in which storage management is outside the programmer's control), so if you're interested attracting a community, I'd suggest focusing on something that other languages don't do well and also floats your boat. Is concurrent distributed processing solved to your satisfaction? How about parser generation? Are there any math or graphics libraries, web APIs, or low level protocols that deserve to be accessible to more programmers without specialized knowledge? Can you make monads comprehensible? One of these might be the killer feature that gets people on board.