HN Explorer

The $LANG Programming Language

267 points by dang ↗ HN
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)

28 comments

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GaryBluto
Very useful! Thanks for the addition.
dang
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)

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_false
https://news.ycombinator.com/showlang is the first time I've seen a direct URL that adds an element to the navbar. Did you make this HN feature just for showlang or are there any other similar links?
clusmore
There is also shownew and highlights at least, I think maybe a few others still
dang
See https://news.ycombinator.com/lists, linked from the footer. Those are the main ones.

I won't add /thelang and /showlang unless we have a way of keeping them up to date, which we don't (for now) have.

chuckadams
For a moment I thought there was actually a new language called $LANG, which would have been wonderful.
macintux
I feel like there’s an Advent of Code challenge lurking here.
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jeswin
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.

zahlman
That reminds me, I really should blog my design ideas for my spiritual successor to Python....
fsckboy
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.

gdotdesign
Thanks for putting these lists together. When Mint reaches 1.0 I'll use the same format to present it here.
nozzlegear
I've used Mint in one of my apps, I'm a fan! Looking forward to that 1.0 release whenever it happens.
almusdives
Just wanted to say this post has caused a huge spike in traffic to my language's website: a dizzying ~40 visitors per day up from ~0 haha!
middayc
What are these /thelang and /showlang?

Are these like permanent urls that we can use to filter posts?

This makes me thing about what other permanent urls/filters there are. Is there a list somewhere?

oecumena
'The Lobster Programming Language (strlen.com)' is duplicated.