The $LANG Programming Language

1 day ago

This afternoon I posted some tips on how to present a new* programming language to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23459210)

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

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!

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

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)

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?

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

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.

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

  • Alas, yes, at least for now. Seems like an LLM could be good at finding them though. A regex is probably too crude.

    • 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) 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.i.... Better algorithms are surely available.)

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.