7 ms·

The $LANG Programming Language

267 points by dang 10mo ago

This afternoon I posted some tips on how to present a new* programming language to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46608577 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/thelang Similarly, Show HNs of programming languages are at https://news.ycombinator.com/showlang 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=934142 - Nov 2009 (219 comments) The Rust programming language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1498528 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1498528 - July 2010 (44 comments) The Julia Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3606380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3606380 - Feb 2012 (203 comments) The Swift Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7835099 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23459210)

wizzwizz4 10mo ago
So these are just static pages, not new entries for https://news.ycombinator.com/lists https://news.ycombinator.com/lists?
- dang 10mo ago
  Alas, yes, at least for now. Seems like an LLM could be good at finding them though. A regex is probably too crude.
  - wizzwizz4 10mo ago
    The old lesson from the Wizard of Oz experiment says that a regular expression probably isn't too crude, if you're willing to take the time to design it. Though you could probably get away with running a regex golf algorithm (e.g. https://nbviewer.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313.ipynb https://nbviewer.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313.ipynb) over the list of matching titles, and the union of some list of non-matching-but-close titles (chosen to get good discrimination) with some list of way-off titles (to avoid overfitting). (You could treat the whole HN title database, other than the ones you've identified, as losers, but that risks hardcoding the absence of a post you accidentally missed, and would also take slightly longer – though Peter Norvig's first algorithm takes time linear in the number of losers, so it might not be too expensive. I don't know how expensive his improved versions are, given large lists of losers: https://nbviewer.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313-part2.ipynb https://nbviewer.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313-part2.i.... Better algorithms are surely available.)
- dredmorbius 10mo ago
  That was going to be my suggestion as well.
GaryBluto 10mo ago
Very useful! Thanks for the addition.
dang 10mo ago
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)
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- _false 10mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/showlang 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 10mo ago
    There is also shownew and highlights at least, I think maybe a few others still
  - dang 10mo ago
    See https://news.ycombinator.com/lists 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.
johnfn 10mo ago
This is a fun false positive :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34675259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34675259
- dang 10mo ago
  Whoops! I tried to catch those but yes.
  - sjosh 10mo ago
    Another false positive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13252407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13252407 Thanks for making this!
    - dang 10mo ago
      Not sure if I should remove those or leave them in for color! I did remove "The Perfect Programming Language" and "The Enterprise Programming Language" and a few others that weren't real languages. "Enterprise" is a great name for a programming language though.
      - rchard2scout 10mo ago
        One more false positive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16860445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16860445 "Value in Learning Yet Another" also seems like a great name for an esoteric programming language.
        dang 10mo ago
        It reminds me of the usernames like "Your Own Mother How Could You" in FPS games from 20 years ago. "You killed Your Own Mother How Could You"
      - hiccuphippo 10mo ago
        > Enterprise A language to go where no language has gone before.
chuckadams 10mo ago
For a moment I thought there was actually a new language called $LANG, which would have been wonderful.
- trollbridge 10mo ago
  I was thinking how it would be odd to have a programming language called en_AU.UTF-8.
  - mixmastamyk 10mo ago
    echo “G’day World!”
    - edoceo 10mo ago
      *G'day mate
    - anotherevan 10mo ago
      drawl “G’day mate.”
    - dghf 10mo ago
      All error messages begin "Strewth!"
    - trollbridge 10mo ago
      The localisation guide for IBM VisualAge C++ went through an example of defining a new language called “Texan”, and then replacing “Hello World” with “Howdy”.
- Lammy 10mo ago
  There's a language called SLang inside Goldman Sachs used for their SecuritiesDB, and that's how I read it at first glance even with the dollar sign lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Dubno#SecDB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Dubno#SecDB
  - 10mo ago
macintux 10mo ago
I feel like there’s an Advent of Code challenge lurking here.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
jeswin 10mo ago
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 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.
- dang 10mo ago
  That's great! It didn't make the /show page because some of the upvotes were dropped by our software. We can re-up it, but first can you add some text to the post, explaining the background and what's different about it? If you look at what I told the Lax guys earlier (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46608577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46608577), that might give some ideas. Also, if you're ok with changing the title to "Show HN: The Tsonic Programming Language" then I could add it to https://news.ycombinator.com/showlang https://news.ycombinator.com/showlang :)
  - jeswin 10mo ago
    Hi dang, done. Thank you! Your feedback on the other thread was very helpful - just the right thing to add, irrespective of HN visibility.
  - lassejansen 10mo ago
    I did a Show HN for the language "hyTags" yesterday, too. It's a language embedded in HTML, using tags as syntax. It quickly dropped of the new page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46599403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46599403 Could you add that too to showlang?
zahlman 10mo ago
That reminds me, I really should blog my design ideas for my spiritual successor to Python....
fsckboy 10mo ago
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.
MopAmine 10mo ago
[flagged]
lingying 10mo ago
The MoonBit Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37174619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37174619 -Aug 19, 2023 (152 comments)
- dang 10mo ago
  As with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618769, that one didn't make it into the list because the title didn't fit the convention. I've added it now. It would be better if it just said "The MoonBit Programming Language" though!
big-chungus4 10mo ago
where can I check out the language?
- dang 10mo ago
  Maybe someone will make one!
Animats 10mo ago
See "The Your Name Here Story" (1960) [1] It's a generic industrial film. [1] https://archive.org/details/YourName1960 https://archive.org/details/YourName1960
gdotdesign 10mo ago
Thanks for putting these lists together. When Mint reaches 1.0 I'll use the same format to present it here.
- dang 10mo ago
  Ah I missed the previous threads about your language, because they didn't follow the title convention I was searching for. I've put https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17161533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17161533 (the first one) in there now. It would be better if it just said "The Mint Programming Language" though (and I'm not above fudging that retroactively!) Mint – language created for writing single-page applications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36914888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36914888 - July 2023 (11 comments) Mint: A programming language for writing single page applications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22246615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22246615 - Feb 2020 (194 comments) Mint-lang: a language for the front-end web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17161533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17161533 - May 2018 (106 comments)
  - gdotdesign 10mo ago
    Thanks :) I didn't make those threads, so the title choices were mine. I'll do a proper Show HN with 1.0 sometime, maybe with can switch it with that then.
    - gdotdesign 10mo ago
      *weren't
- nozzlegear 10mo ago
  I've used Mint in one of my apps, I'm a fan! Looking forward to that 1.0 release whenever it happens.
almusdives 10mo ago
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!
MopAmine 10mo ago
[flagged]
zeckalpha 10mo ago
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Programming_Languages_(conference) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Programming_Languag...
middayc 10mo ago
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?
- dang 10mo ago
  They're static lists that won't get updated unless we add to them manually. I'd love to make them auto-update (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610744) but that might be too much to expect for now.
oecumena 10mo ago
'The Lobster Programming Language (strlen.com)' is duplicated.
- dang 10mo ago
  IIRC there are quite a few cases in there where the same language got more than one thread. That's fine as long as they're (a) interesting, and (b) a year or more apart! (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
gabrielsroka 10mo ago
My "Pith" programming language didn't make the cut https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32681150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32681150 Webpage using Pith instead of JavaScript to fetch HN Polls using the HN Search API https://gabrielsroka.github.io/hnpolls_pith.html https://gabrielsroka.github.io/hnpolls_pith.html Source https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/master/hnpolls_pith.html https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/...
- dang 10mo ago
  Added now!

267 points by dang 10mo ago

wizzwizz4 10mo ago

So these are just static pages, not new entries for https://news.ycombinator.com/lists https://news.ycombinator.com/lists?

dang 10mo ago
Alas, yes, at least for now. Seems like an LLM could be good at finding them though. A regex is probably too crude.
- wizzwizz4 10mo ago
  The old lesson from the Wizard of Oz experiment says that a regular expression probably isn't too crude, if you're willing to take the time to design it. Though you could probably get away with running a regex golf algorithm (e.g. https://nbviewer.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313.ipynb https://nbviewer.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313.ipynb) over the list of matching titles, and the union of some list of non-matching-but-close titles (chosen to get good discrimination) with some list of way-off titles (to avoid overfitting). (You could treat the whole HN title database, other than the ones you've identified, as losers, but that risks hardcoding the absence of a post you accidentally missed, and would also take slightly longer – though Peter Norvig's first algorithm takes time linear in the number of losers, so it might not be too expensive. I don't know how expensive his improved versions are, given large lists of losers: https://nbviewer.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313-part2.ipynb https://nbviewer.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313-part2.i.... Better algorithms are surely available.)
dredmorbius 10mo ago
That was going to be my suggestion as well.

GaryBluto 10mo ago

Very useful! Thanks for the addition.

dang 10mo ago

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)

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
_false 10mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/showlang 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 10mo ago
  There is also shownew and highlights at least, I think maybe a few others still
- dang 10mo ago
  See https://news.ycombinator.com/lists 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.

johnfn 10mo ago

This is a fun false positive :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34675259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34675259

dang 10mo ago
Whoops! I tried to catch those but yes.
- sjosh 10mo ago
  Another false positive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13252407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13252407 Thanks for making this!
  - dang 10mo ago
    Not sure if I should remove those or leave them in for color! I did remove "The Perfect Programming Language" and "The Enterprise Programming Language" and a few others that weren't real languages. "Enterprise" is a great name for a programming language though.
    - rchard2scout 10mo ago
      One more false positive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16860445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16860445 "Value in Learning Yet Another" also seems like a great name for an esoteric programming language.
      - dang 10mo ago
        It reminds me of the usernames like "Your Own Mother How Could You" in FPS games from 20 years ago. "You killed Your Own Mother How Could You"
    - hiccuphippo 10mo ago
      > Enterprise A language to go where no language has gone before.

chuckadams 10mo ago

For a moment I thought there was actually a new language called $LANG, which would have been wonderful.

trollbridge 10mo ago
I was thinking how it would be odd to have a programming language called en_AU.UTF-8.
- mixmastamyk 10mo ago
  echo “G’day World!”
  - edoceo 10mo ago
    *G'day mate
  - anotherevan 10mo ago
    drawl “G’day mate.”
  - dghf 10mo ago
    All error messages begin "Strewth!"
  - trollbridge 10mo ago
    The localisation guide for IBM VisualAge C++ went through an example of defining a new language called “Texan”, and then replacing “Hello World” with “Howdy”.
Lammy 10mo ago
There's a language called SLang inside Goldman Sachs used for their SecuritiesDB, and that's how I read it at first glance even with the dollar sign lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Dubno#SecDB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Dubno#SecDB
- 10mo ago

macintux 10mo ago

I feel like there’s an Advent of Code challenge lurking here.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

jeswin 10mo ago

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 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.

dang 10mo ago
That's great! It didn't make the /show page because some of the upvotes were dropped by our software. We can re-up it, but first can you add some text to the post, explaining the background and what's different about it? If you look at what I told the Lax guys earlier (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46608577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46608577), that might give some ideas. Also, if you're ok with changing the title to "Show HN: The Tsonic Programming Language" then I could add it to https://news.ycombinator.com/showlang https://news.ycombinator.com/showlang :)
- jeswin 10mo ago
  Hi dang, done. Thank you! Your feedback on the other thread was very helpful - just the right thing to add, irrespective of HN visibility.
- lassejansen 10mo ago
  I did a Show HN for the language "hyTags" yesterday, too. It's a language embedded in HTML, using tags as syntax. It quickly dropped of the new page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46599403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46599403 Could you add that too to showlang?

zahlman 10mo ago

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

fsckboy 10mo ago

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.

MopAmine 10mo ago

[flagged]

lingying 10mo ago

The MoonBit Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37174619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37174619 -Aug 19, 2023 (152 comments)

dang 10mo ago
As with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618769 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618769, that one didn't make it into the list because the title didn't fit the convention. I've added it now. It would be better if it just said "The MoonBit Programming Language" though!

big-chungus4 10mo ago

where can I check out the language?

dang 10mo ago
Maybe someone will make one!

Animats 10mo ago

See "The Your Name Here Story" (1960) [1] It's a generic industrial film. [1] https://archive.org/details/YourName1960 https://archive.org/details/YourName1960

gdotdesign 10mo ago

Thanks for putting these lists together. When Mint reaches 1.0 I'll use the same format to present it here.

dang 10mo ago
Ah I missed the previous threads about your language, because they didn't follow the title convention I was searching for. I've put https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17161533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17161533 (the first one) in there now. It would be better if it just said "The Mint Programming Language" though (and I'm not above fudging that retroactively!) Mint – language created for writing single-page applications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36914888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36914888 - July 2023 (11 comments) Mint: A programming language for writing single page applications - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22246615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22246615 - Feb 2020 (194 comments) Mint-lang: a language for the front-end web - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17161533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17161533 - May 2018 (106 comments)
- gdotdesign 10mo ago
  Thanks :) I didn't make those threads, so the title choices were mine. I'll do a proper Show HN with 1.0 sometime, maybe with can switch it with that then.
  - gdotdesign 10mo ago
    *weren't
nozzlegear 10mo ago
I've used Mint in one of my apps, I'm a fan! Looking forward to that 1.0 release whenever it happens.

almusdives 10mo ago

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!

MopAmine 10mo ago

[flagged]

zeckalpha 10mo ago

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Programming_Languages_(conference) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Programming_Languag...

middayc 10mo ago

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?

dang 10mo ago
They're static lists that won't get updated unless we add to them manually. I'd love to make them auto-update (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610744) but that might be too much to expect for now.

oecumena 10mo ago

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

dang 10mo ago
IIRC there are quite a few cases in there where the same language got more than one thread. That's fine as long as they're (a) interesting, and (b) a year or more apart! (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

gabrielsroka 10mo ago

My "Pith" programming language didn't make the cut https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32681150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32681150 Webpage using Pith instead of JavaScript to fetch HN Polls using the HN Search API https://gabrielsroka.github.io/hnpolls_pith.html https://gabrielsroka.github.io/hnpolls_pith.html Source https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/master/hnpolls_pith.html https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/...

dang 10mo ago
Added now!