Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lily Programming Language

lily-lang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 50 posts

Re: Lily Programming Language

#41

Post by ngrilly »

nextaccountic wrote: post #24
7e wrote: post #16

Has anyone yet designed a language with the explicit goal of being cheapest/easiest to use by an AI coding agent?

January 2026 might be the month of langs created to be used by AI. Usually the chief concern is saving on tokens, prompted by context window anxiety. (This completely disregards the fact that agents thrash the context window by doing wrong things, then attempting to fix them; or by reading unrelated stuff; or by calling unhelpful tools; etc) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46450217 Nerd: A language for LLMs, not…

> Nerd: A language for LLMs, not humans

Interesting take, because I think precisely the opposite. Coding agents let us produce a lot of code, code that we need to read and review. That means we need languages optimized for code generation by AI, and code review by humans.

Re: Lily Programming Language

#43

Post by publicdebates »

pansa2 wrote: post #13

> statically-typed > Embed/extend in C Is Lily intended to be (or could it be used as) a statically-typed alternative to Lua? Personally I'm happy with dynamic typing for scripting - but I suspect many people would welcome a statically-typed option, and there don't seem to be many available.

Many of us would love a TypeScript analogy for Lua.

There have been some attempts:

Luau (5.2k, last week, https://luau.org/, https://github.com/edubart/nelua-lang)

Nelua (2.3k, 8 months ago, https://nelua.io/, https://github.com/luau-lang/luau)

Terra (2.9k, 3 days ago, https://terralang.org/, https://github.com/terralang/terra)

Teal (2.7k, 2 days ago, https://teal-language.org/, https://github.com/teal-language/tl)

The Luau author is always on the official Lua mailing list, and it has twice as many stars, so it seems likely to win the long term popularity contest.

Re: Lily Programming Language

#44

Post by publicdebates »

publicdebates wrote: post #43
pansa2 wrote: post #13

> statically-typed > Embed/extend in C Is Lily intended to be (or could it be used as) a statically-typed alternative to Lua? Personally I'm happy with dynamic typing for scripting - but I suspect many people would welcome a statically-typed option, and there don't seem to be many available.

Many of us would love a TypeScript analogy for Lua. There have been some attempts: Luau (5.2k, last week, https://luau.org/ , https://github.com/edubart/nelua-lang ) Nelua (2.3k, 8 months ago, https://nelua.io/ , https://github.com/luau-lang/luau ) Terra (2.9k, 3 days ago, https://terralang.org/ , https://github.com/terralang/terra ) Teal (2.7k, 2 days ago, https://teal-language.org/ , https://github.com/teal-languag…

Also it looks like[1] Luau is the official Roblox Studio scripting language, and is baed on Lua 5.1 (possibly LuaJIT?) which means it's behind mainstream Lua.

Not sure which Lua versions the others are based on.

[1] https://create.roblox.com/docs/luau

Re: Lily Programming Language

#45

Post by worldsavior »

Yet another programming language. Why not invest the time into fixing other languages? Is it really so important to have _that_ keyword and not having _that_ `;`? There are enough languages for probably all tasks.

Re: Lily Programming Language

#46

Post by paulddraper »

dismalaf wrote: post #18
nine_k wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The why: because Lua, Python, JavaScript, Janet, etc lack many or all these features. And each of these features is known to make life easier for a human programmer.

Looking through that list of features, Ruby (the dynamic language I know best) has all but 1 built-in (and the other can be added with Gems). I'm guessing Python probably has them all too (but I don't know Python that well). They're pretty common. So the why still isn't clear.

Tell me more about Ruby generics….

Re: Lily Programming Language

#47

Post by dismalaf »

paulddraper wrote: post #46
dismalaf wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking through that list of features, Ruby (the dynamic language I know best) has all but 1 built-in (and the other can be added with Gems). I'm guessing Python probably has them all too (but I don't know Python that well). They're pretty common. So the why still isn't clear.

Tell me more about Ruby generics….

Want to split hairs eh?

Duck typing achieves the same thing as "generics", just at runtime vs. compile time.

Re: Lily Programming Language

#48

Post by paulddraper »

dismalaf wrote: post #47
paulddraper wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me more about Ruby generics….

Want to split hairs eh? Duck typing achieves the same thing as "generics", just at runtime vs. compile time.

Generics are implicitly compile time checks.

It’s a willful misinterpretation to read otherwise.

Re: Lily Programming Language

#49

Post by debugnik »

publicdebates wrote: post #43
pansa2 wrote: post #13

> statically-typed > Embed/extend in C Is Lily intended to be (or could it be used as) a statically-typed alternative to Lua? Personally I'm happy with dynamic typing for scripting - but I suspect many people would welcome a statically-typed option, and there don't seem to be many available.

Many of us would love a TypeScript analogy for Lua. There have been some attempts: Luau (5.2k, last week, https://luau.org/ , https://github.com/edubart/nelua-lang ) Nelua (2.3k, 8 months ago, https://nelua.io/ , https://github.com/luau-lang/luau ) Terra (2.9k, 3 days ago, https://terralang.org/ , https://github.com/terralang/terra ) Teal (2.7k, 2 days ago, https://teal-language.org/ , https://github.com/teal-languag…

Note that some of those can't run on a regular Lua runtime.

Luau is a separate implementation of a Lua dialect. However, it's backed by Roblox and being increasingly used in high budget games such as Alan Wake 2, and tools like Rive.

And Terra is more of a low-level language embedded in regular Lua for metaprogramming, than a statically-typed Lua.

In this vein there's also Pallene, which integrates better with regular Lua on a slightly-patched Lua runtime.

https://github.com/pallene-lang/pallene

(BTW the links for Nelua and Luau repos got mixed.)

Re: Lily Programming Language

#50

Post by Nevermark »

keychera wrote: post #11
oneseven wrote: post #2

What I really want to see from a "*-programming-language" post on HN is _why_. Why Lily?

I am curious as well. some past readme has Why sections and I am not sure why they are removed/changed this have "Why" section https://gitlab.com/FascinatedBox/lily/-/blob/d3ace2907747106... this have "How Lily stands out from other languages:" section https://gitlab.com/FascinatedBox/lily/-/blob/785a88534cced53...

> More importantly, this design makes it easy to compose whole programs that will never be paused by a garbage collection by avoiding cyclical structures.

Or by "breaking" cycles, which will trigger the reference count deallocation.

Post reply on HN