Comment by dang
2 days ago
There are no restrictions against any programming languages. There are restrictions against accounts using HN primarily for promotion. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
2 days ago
There are no restrictions against any programming languages. There are restrictions against accounts using HN primarily for promotion. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Mr. dang, that does not appear to be true (about restrictions), based on facts and reviewing profiles: 1) Hacker News gives the impression of specifically having restrictions against certain languages, that looks to result in bans, shadow bans, and censorship. 2) You have obvious accounts that have been strongly promoting their languages on Hacker News (with posts numbering into the thousands), for many years.
Examples of accounts using Hacker News for language and site promotion: 1) AndyKelley (Zig creator and profile promotes full throttle), 2) kristoff_it (profile clearly states he's the VP of Zig Software Foundation), 3) gingerBill (Odin creator), 4) lerno (C3 creator and numerous submissions), pcwalton (many comments about Dlang, however, submissions are very varied), etc...
Speaking of which, the number of Zig and Rust posts and submissions on Hacker News are insane (per search). Absolutely insane! Rust is not even in the top 10 of programming languages, and Zig is the lower part of the top 50 languages. It's to the extent we are left to wonder if Hacker News is financially linked to them or perhaps submissions about languages other than Zig or Rust can be quietly ghosted or treated like a bannable offense. If we submit something other than about Zig or Rust, it should not be interpreted as excessively promoting that language.
I just study about many languages (emphasis on many) and gave some opinions. Have no allegiance to any language organization. Unlike the accounts previously mentioned, who may even advertise their affiliations on their Hacker News profiles. Links I have submitted (which are few), were for and about many different languages, not just only one. Stealth censorship is something dastardly and gives the impression of a hidden approval list, and those languages not on it (and any supporters or submissions) are subject to being censored.
HN has had many threads about, for example, array languages (APL/K/J/BQN) and stack languages (Forth et. al.), and countless languages even more obscure than those. HN is, in fact, in love with obscure programming languages. The fact that some languages are more popular than others doesn't mean we're biased in favor of them. If there's a bias, it's in favor of having threads about lesser-known ones. That doesn't mean every submission about them automatically makes the front page. (Your submissions in particular are getting affected by the software filters I mentioned in my reply above—but that's got nothing to do with which programming languages they're about.)
The stuff about dastardly censorship and financial shenanigans is, forgive me, a bit silly. HN is a big statistical cloud or, if you want to be more vivid about it, a big Rohrschach diagram. People can (and do) imagine any such monsters into it—all I can tell you is if anything so weird is happening, I'm completely unaware of it.
There have always been waves of internet drama about programming languages, going back to Usenet and no doubt earlier than that. Your comment makes me wonder if you might be getting swept along in the latest of those a little bit. If that's not the case, I'm happy to be wrong, but some of the tone of your comment reminds me of how certain language-enthusiast communities enjoy going to battle against each other nowadays. That's fine as a hobby but not on topic for HN.