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I'm waffling on when to "ship" the programming language I've been working on for the past couple years. I think it could be something real and useful, but there

I'm waffling on when to "ship" the programming language I've been working on for the past couple years. I think it could be something real and useful, but there are still things I want to add/redesign/fix before I officially thrust it out into the world as an alpha version. But I'm worried about killing the initial spark of enthusiasm when people try to use it and it's still broken. Or when they start building on it and then I redesign some language feature and their code doesn't work in newer versions. I wonder if it's a different question for something like a language, or whether I'm just getting sucked into the classic fallacy

danenania 4y ago
Shipping isn't a binary and it isn't something you can only do once. If the project is still very rough, "shipping" may just mean emailing it to 20 people you think might be interested. Getting reactions from real people is the key thing, not publicizing it far and wide--in many cases it is smart to wait on that until you've gone through a bunch of iterations with a small number of early users. For example, you could post a link to your language right here. Not that many people will see it, but some of the ones that do may give you useful feedback and start keeping tabs on the project. There isn't much downside.