Live data from Hacker News

Programming Language Checklist

famicol.in

1–10 of 169 posts

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#3
post #2

Has there really been only one big thread? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6784085 Edit: well, there's also this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7836410 Can anybody track down the year this was written?

Looks like it goes back to at least November, 2011:

https://web.archive.org/web/20111103024132/http://colinm.org...

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#4
Of course, every successful language could be roasted with this, too.

It's a cute post but if there were a simple checklist for creating a successful language, every language designer would just do that.

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#5
post #4

Of course, every successful language could be roasted with this, too. It's a cute post but if there were a simple checklist for creating a successful language, every language designer would just do that.

It's not intending to be. Pretty sure it's a joke. (See the last checklist block on the page

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#6
post #4

Of course, every successful language could be roasted with this, too. It's a cute post but if there were a simple checklist for creating a successful language, every language designer would just do that.

But you can't fill out the checklist "correctly", that's the entire point. A lot of these points are mutually exclusive, and which point to pick is a matter of conviction a lot of the time. Some of these points can be checked no matter the language (eg, you appear to believe that scaling to large projects will be easy).

This is particularly obvious in the "Your language has/lacks" section, where whichever choice you make can be argued against for almost every point.

The point is that you there is no such thing as a perfect language and the success of a language rarely depends on the kind of criteria that programmers will judge them on at first glance, and success is a relative thing.

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#7
post #4

Of course, every successful language could be roasted with this, too. It's a cute post but if there were a simple checklist for creating a successful language, every language designer would just do that.

It's not intending to be. Pretty sure it's a joke. (See the last checklist block on the page

joke for sure, made me laugh out loud :)

Re: Programming Language Checklist

#10
post #8

[ ] You require the compiler to be present at runtime [ ] You require the language runtime to be present at compile-time The guy never heard of Lisp so I wouldn't pay much attention to this anyway.

I think those were included specifically to poke fun at Lisp. The list isn’t meant to be taken very seriously.
Post reply on HN