Oh, hey, I'm on Hacker News. I'm surprised and a little embarrassed to see my site here, but I'll take the opportunity to address some of the things y'all have

Oh, hey, I'm on Hacker News. I'm surprised and a little embarrassed to see my site here, but I'll take the opportunity to address some of the things y'all have mentioned. To people proposing language alternatives: a totally fair point, and more power to you. I made this site back in college when I was studying Sanskrit for the first time, and I was disappointed by the lack of resources available online. The site started as a series of study notes and sort of mutated into a "course" ... but that course is incomplete and has been in desperate need of repair for some time. About the PHP errors: yeah, sorry about that! I started out with PHP because I knew pretty much nothing about web programming and needed something that "just worked." The new version of the site, which has been in development hell for a year, is in Flask (Python). I haven't touched the PHP stuff in two years, and I usually need gloves and a whole lot of disinfectant to do so. Why learn online: because the books are usually disappointing or expensive. Why Sanskrit: I just find it particularly beautiful. The statement that r0h1n took issue with is stated grandiosely, but I stand by it. On "Hindutva nonsense": I empathize strongly with their motivations, but I agree that most of the ink spilled in the name of Sanskrit is vacuous and hyperbolic. For those wondering about the fuss: I particularly enjoy kāvya [1], usually because it's just beautiful poetry [2] but also because it shows off some fancy linguistic acrobatics, the likes of which I haven't seen in any other language [3]. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavya http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavya [2]: Citation needed, but I like Kālidāsa in particular. One of the least horrible translations of one of his most beautiful works: http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/sha/sha17.htm http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/sha/sha17.htm [3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishupala_Vadha#Linguistic_ingenuity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishupala_Vadha#Linguistic_ing... for some examples.