> the specification is CC-BY-ND (the latter is notably less free, albeit for good reasons)
Anyone know what these "good reasons" are? I recall Stallman himself does the same thing, licensing his prose in a non modifiable format. To me it seems in screaming opposition to the idea of copyleft -- "make all the changes you want, but be sure to distribute them".
I hope this isn’t incorrect, but I recall Drew once saying he didn’t want people to make variations of the language by forking the compiler and changing a page or two of the spec, since that would result in slightly incompatible code.
> The reason they don’t is because I asked them not to, and we maintain a mutual understanding regarding the need for privacy.
This is the only sane definition.
But otherwise I don't totally get the point of this post. "We're private for reasons XYZ, please don't share it" followed by "reach out if you want to work on it". And all we know about the language is that the goal is "simplicity".
If I squint a bit I could interpret it as asking for help but at the same time he throws up a barrier to keep out the people that don't have the skills or the motivation to put in the work. It sort of makes sense.
I'm afraid years of seeing people talk in great detail, in public, around the edges of something they "aren't ready to talk about" has led only to greater disappointment or greater cynicism.
Conversations like this in private, sure.
A straight recruitment post for contributors to a private project? Yeah.
This sort of thing? Come back when you're ready to talk about it. It's fine, we all have our own thing going on!
The Segway got a lot of pre-announcement hype. It was referred to as "It" and a lot of well-connected people were allowed to see It and talked It up (at least in quotes splashed around the news) and the hype was way too much for the actual thing. Which got a "That's it?" response from most people and the press. It was supposed to be revolutionary, as big as the PC. It was a scooter.
It was revolutionary in the self-balancing aspect.
I don't think it's the hype cycle that killed the Segway so much as the unwillingness of really any national government or major municipality to encourage people to whizz around on pavements using a powered device.
Nowadays, regrettably, that horse has bolted, and all sorts of sociopaths think foopaths are the right place for their badly-maintained future-electrical-fire on wheels!
Self-balancing may have been revolutionary, but not as revolutionary as the PC, which is how it was playing out in the news at the time (pre-announcement). Though maybe that's a matter of opinion, but I doubt most people think that a self-balancing scooter is going to change the world, which is how it was getting hyped up. The hype really did help kill it because expectations were way too high, and the cost ($5000 or so, used car prices), and then it ended up with the public image as the thing tourists and mall cops used.
Ah yes... "Project Ginger" was promised to fully revolutionize society, bigger than the Internet, etc. People do seem to forget how old the tech-hype circus is, and with a lot of the same promises, always "too early yet" with the promised benefits lying just around the corner.
There's a social media trick where you make some really obvious mistake (eg pronounce "Mario" as "mah-RYE-oh" in a video) and then rely on people's "well akshully" in the comments causing you to go viral. Regardless if it's intentional or not, it's probably working since this already has 18 comments after only being posted a half hour ago hahah
I can't tell why you're being this petty. The man explicitly asked for people to respect his wish of the project being public but not advertised.
If a quick search leads anyone to find it, why not leave it at that? The ones who are interested will find it. All you did was to be be contrarian for no good reason.
And to answer parent's question with my own impression: the post serves to tell people like me (that tangentially knew the language is in development) that work is being done, and if any of us has more than a cursory interest, they can get in touch to help. It also serves to tell people that are not immediately interested in helping that spreading the word about the project is not encouraged. I can't think of why there needs to be more of a "point" than this.
There doesn't have to be a point. It just seemed really odd, so I pointed out that it was odd. I also refrained from commenting on the language as I had understood it.
You’re almost certainly being downvoted in the first case for having snarked about somebody taking their own time for their own project. How fast you could do it isn’t really relevant, so it’s just a pointless dig.
And then in the second case because the rules ask you to meta-converse about downvotes
Given that Zig hasn't reached 1.0 yet, I'd say that no you cannot download a 'stable release' of Zig.
AFAIK the main reason for that is because AK wants to have a fast (debug) compiler before reaching 1.0 and that Zig isn't just a thin layer above C mainly due to its compile time feature, unsigned overflow being UB in Zig is another.
Imagine your friend says “I’ve been working on this painting for a year”.
You can say “That’s a lot of dedication, you must be really into this project” or “you should be able to paint faster than that.”
One of these is the right and answer and the other is wrong. HN doesn’t require that you hype up every poster, but if you’re going to minimize their efforts we instead ask you to just not submit that comment.
Javascript was created in 2 weeks. It then took two decades to become nearly tolerable to use. That it would cost 2 years to make a language is an absolutely arbitrary amount of time. Most great languages took significantly longer than that to become truly great.
> Edit: Genuinely interested on why the downvotes? But nevermind.
> Also, you should be able to create a new language in less than two years. I've certainly done so, though I admit ones not widely adopted :-)
This community isn't particularly fond of minimizing others' work. I'm not particularly interested in learning this language but I can still respect the effort.
I clicked through to the list of projects written in the language & was immediately taken back to 25 years ago, having an internet-facing public_html directory sitting at ~username on a web server. :)
I don't see the original comment saying anything's wrong with it. It's an older way of doing things, sure, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I actually quite like the way it's done.
I work on an open source language, none of these (e.g. jai) style of work's rationale ever really rings true to me day to day. Designing languages is hard but most of the feedback I receive on my ideas is from people who are very smart and usually right.
ddevault is an extremely talented developer. this looks like a cool project. like many of his projects there's a weird undercurrent of hostility towards the greater developer community (e.g. `--my-next-gpu-will-not-be-nvidia`). i never understood the need for that, and it's a hard stop for me when choosing tooling.
> When people complain to me about the lack of Nvidia support in Sway, I get really pissed off. It is not my fucking problem to support Nvidia, it’s Nvidia’s fucking problem to support me. Even Broadcom, fucking Broadcom, supports the appropriate kernel APIs. And proprietary driver users have the gall to reward Nvidia for their behavior by giving them hundreds of dollars for their GPUs, then come to me and ask me to deal with their bullshit for free. Well, fuck you, too. Nvidia users are shitty consumers and I don’t even want them in my userbase. Choose hardware that supports your software, not the other way around.
this anger seems misplaced and dare I say, bit entitled
I fully agree with this, and that's why every single post of his about the language fills me with dread. It's a complete waste of talent, boiling the ocean, instead of simply "taking over" an existing minor language with his talent. Or just do his thing with Go, or Rust, or any of the other zillion system languages in the world.
Emotionally I want to be proven wrong, and see that language thrive, Linux/gcc-style against all odds, but rationally, I think there's only one language that can even approach C-killer levels and that's Rust.
If Rust with a literal Evangelism Strike Force can't kill C, then nothing can.
> Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust. Hare uses a static type system, manual memory management, and a minimal runtime. It is well-suited to writing operating systems, system tools, compilers, networking software, and other low-level, high performance tasks.
A code example:
use io;
export fn main() void = {
const greetings = [
"Hello, world!",
"¡Hola Mundo!",
"Γειά σου Κόσμε!",
"Привет, мир!",
"こんにちは世界！",
];
for (let i = 0z; i < len(greetings); i += 1) {
io::println(greetings[i]);
};
};
And a list of Design principles
Trust the programmer.
Provide tools the programmer may use when they don't trust themselves.
Prefer explicit behavior over implicit behavior.
A good program must be both correct and simple.
Without any elaboration on "Provide tools the programmer may use" assuming that these will relate to language concepts of constructs, there's no differentiating it from many of the well-established 'better C' languages. If there's anything we've learned it's that anything close to C in the area of "Trust the programmer" leads to broken software and we need to aim higher.
it doesn't really trust the programmer. it is even more opinioned than go, where every unused variable or function is an error. eg. it has weird identation rules, like mandatory hard tabs, and alignment demands.
it uses the reverse go styles types.
but if you look at the stdlib, it looks pretty clean.
The irony is that the C creators were all aware of this, that is why they also created lint (in 1979!), but many macho devs think they know better and dealing with compiler warnings is too much trouble.
This feels like an "it is what it is"-style viral stunt, even though I actually suspect it's a sincere(?) post about reasons for developing without an audience.
It's gonna end up with more of an audience now, tho... :eye::mouth::eye:
73 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadAnyone know what these "good reasons" are? I recall Stallman himself does the same thing, licensing his prose in a non modifiable format. To me it seems in screaming opposition to the idea of copyleft -- "make all the changes you want, but be sure to distribute them".
This is the only sane definition.
But otherwise I don't totally get the point of this post. "We're private for reasons XYZ, please don't share it" followed by "reach out if you want to work on it". And all we know about the language is that the goal is "simplicity".
So, ok.
I'm afraid years of seeing people talk in great detail, in public, around the edges of something they "aren't ready to talk about" has led only to greater disappointment or greater cynicism.
Conversations like this in private, sure.
A straight recruitment post for contributors to a private project? Yeah.
This sort of thing? Come back when you're ready to talk about it. It's fine, we all have our own thing going on!
[Edit for weird tiredness error]
Not sure what you're getting at here. Is it your contention that Kamen talked about it too soon, or too late?
I don't think it's the hype cycle that killed the Segway so much as the unwillingness of really any national government or major municipality to encourage people to whizz around on pavements using a powered device.
Nowadays, regrettably, that horse has bolted, and all sorts of sociopaths think foopaths are the right place for their badly-maintained future-electrical-fire on wheels!
What exactly did it revolutionize?
Reverse psychology? "Please don't look at my language!"
A quick googling finds this: https://harelang.org/
My first impression is that it's somewhere in the trade space around Go and Zig.
Seems to have been effective here on HN. It worked on me.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law.
Anyway, I definitely have plenty of thoughts about this language but I don't think anyone working on it would care, so I'll refrain.
If a quick search leads anyone to find it, why not leave it at that? The ones who are interested will find it. All you did was to be be contrarian for no good reason.
And to answer parent's question with my own impression: the post serves to tell people like me (that tangentially knew the language is in development) that work is being done, and if any of us has more than a cursory interest, they can get in touch to help. It also serves to tell people that are not immediately interested in helping that spreading the word about the project is not encouraged. I can't think of why there needs to be more of a "point" than this.
Writing a big post about your secret language to a tech crowd seems like a really bad idea. People like puzzles.
Also, you should be able to create a new language in less than two years. I've certainly done so, though I admit ones not widely adopted :-)
Edit: Genuinely interested on why the downvotes? But nevermind.
And then in the second case because the rules ask you to meta-converse about downvotes
This is the snark.
I can go to the websites of those, download the stable release, read tutorials and then use them for actual work, surely?
(Whether I should is another matter)
AFAIK the main reason for that is because AK wants to have a fast (debug) compiler before reaching 1.0 and that Zig isn't just a thin layer above C mainly due to its compile time feature, unsigned overflow being UB in Zig is another.
You can say “That’s a lot of dedication, you must be really into this project” or “you should be able to paint faster than that.”
One of these is the right and answer and the other is wrong. HN doesn’t require that you hype up every poster, but if you’re going to minimize their efforts we instead ask you to just not submit that comment.
> Also, you should be able to create a new language in less than two years. I've certainly done so, though I admit ones not widely adopted :-)
This community isn't particularly fond of minimizing others' work. I'm not particularly interested in learning this language but I can still respect the effort.
This is minimising _my_ effort.
Eye-roll.
This is like working your way around a room and systematically greeting people by telling them you're a bit shy.
edit: it seems they're doing that indeed. kudos
Until it’s open source it’s a proprietary project. If it makes sense for the author I guess it’s a good idea.
I do not quite understand what you mean by this, are you saying that unless they accept contributions it's propietary?
Computers with a 3½" floppy drive may not be available for purchase :-)
5.25 floppy drives are a lot thinner on the ground.
https://drewdevault.com/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html
this anger seems misplaced and dare I say, bit entitled
I fully agree with this, and that's why every single post of his about the language fills me with dread. It's a complete waste of talent, boiling the ocean, instead of simply "taking over" an existing minor language with his talent. Or just do his thing with Go, or Rust, or any of the other zillion system languages in the world.
Emotionally I want to be proven wrong, and see that language thrive, Linux/gcc-style against all odds, but rationally, I think there's only one language that can even approach C-killer levels and that's Rust. If Rust with a literal Evangelism Strike Force can't kill C, then nothing can.
> Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust. Hare uses a static type system, manual memory management, and a minimal runtime. It is well-suited to writing operating systems, system tools, compilers, networking software, and other low-level, high performance tasks.
A code example:
And a list of Design principles Without any elaboration on "Provide tools the programmer may use" assuming that these will relate to language concepts of constructs, there's no differentiating it from many of the well-established 'better C' languages. If there's anything we've learned it's that anything close to C in the area of "Trust the programmer" leads to broken software and we need to aim higher.but if you look at the stdlib, it looks pretty clean.
It's gonna end up with more of an audience now, tho... :eye::mouth::eye:
That's a big list, and I'm most certainly forgetting about some language!
So a historical perspective to kill the "C was first" myth is always good.