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Comment by dang

1 month ago

[stub for offtopicness]

Reminders from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

29 comments

dang

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selfsimilar  1 month ago

"The language is intentionally neutral and apolitical, without any stance on social or political issues."

I don't applaud or condemn this, but it's strange that it's on the home and history pages. Putting this in a code of conduct document for collaborators might make sense, but on the home page? Maybe I'm the weird one, but for most languages I consider them a tool. So it's like going to the hardware store and seeing a hammer that has a label "This is not a Liberal or Conservative hammer." Yeah, buddy I know. It's just a hammer.

  • tshaddox  1 month ago

    It's kinda funny. There is a popular claim that goes something like "silence or inaction is implicit support for the status quo." The point is that there's not really such a thing as "not taking sides."

    I don't quite agree with that, simply because no matter how many things you do take a stance on, there's always an infinite number of things that you haven't taken a stance on.

    But when you go out of your way to explicitly mention that you're refusing to take a stance on all social or political issues, that actually does feel pretty close to explicit approval of the status quo for all social or political issues. Of course this likely was not the intent! So why say it at all?!

  • badsectoracula  1 month ago

    > The language is intentionally neutral and apolitical, without any stance on social or political issues

    TBH despite what it claims, to me it sounds like a political statement by itself.

    (also it is usually the developers of a language -or other project- being judged about their actions/beliefs, not the languages/projects themselves :-P)

  • tinfoilhatter  1 month ago

    Seems to be a newly emerging pattern, with now at least two examples. Here's the other one I'm aware of (from the Gleam programming language homepage):

    Friendly As a community, we want to be friendly too. People from around the world, of all backgrounds, genders, and experience levels are welcome and respected equally. See our community code of conduct for more.

    Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. No nazi bullsh*t.

    [1] https://gleam.run/

  • afavour  1 month ago

    I'm assuming it's referring to not using terms like "slave" or "master", etc etc. There isn't quite the same parallel when talking about a hammer.

pasquinelli  1 month ago

> The language is intentionally neutral and apolitical, without any stance on social or political issues.

does this mean something?

i was very confused by your description of xoscript as typeless. only typeless languages i know of are languages where a variable can only be a word. i assume you mean it's dynamically typed.

every new language that gets on hn gets two criticisms: they don't show code first thing, and they don't start with what problem is being solved by designing a new language. i'm not very interested in those things. i would, however, like to be told what it is in a concise way. you've basically got, if i understand correctly, a smalltalk-like system here, prototype based instead of class based, with dynamically scoped variables, and you're tooling it with server side scripting in mind. that tells me a lot more than code.

as for the what-problem-are-you-solving-by-designing-this-language criticism, if we're honest we can see that every language is either designed as an experiment, "what would a language be like if...?", or it's designed as a matter of personal ergonomics, "i want language X with differences i, j, and k cuz i like it that way." i'm completely fine with that.

  • gabordemooij  1 month ago

    I used PHP, nodejs, Python etc and I just wanted something simpler. I use OpenBSD as my server os and I wanted a scripting language that matches the simplicity (and security) of OpenBSD.