Comment by swiftcoder

Comment by swiftcoder 5 days ago

Regardless of the merits of the language itself, the presentation here leaves something to be desired.

The landing page itself conveys zero information, and when I click into the Introduction, it's almost entirely dedicated to a particularly persnickety whitespace standard, and the grammar rules for parsing comments and identifiers. This is not really helping me understand what the language is about...

Between that and the odd jab at Javascript assignment operators, I have the sense that the author is more interested in grinding axes than in explaining.

WorldMaker 5 days ago

A similar presentation bug that stands out to me, the "Public Domain by Author" copyright claims are non-standard and don't actually do anything legally speaking in the US or many other world jurisdictions, and feel kind of silly/out-of-place. Maybe they are a political statement, but I think that just makes them more annoying, not less. This is why CC0 [0] exists and provides a ton of useful explanations and FAQ and suggestions on dedicating works to the public domain in a way that legally works/matters. Also as a reminder CC0 is not an OSI-approved code license and for that you should consider using something like CC0 "dual licensed" with "1-Clause BSD" [1] for software code. (Though CC0 is directly FSF approved now [and generally considered GPL family compatible], with suggested License verbiage in the CC0 FAQ.)

[0] https://creativecommons.org/public-domain/cc0/

[1] https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-1-Clause.html

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tossandthrow 5 days ago

> I have the sense that the author is more interested in grinding axes than in explaining.

People are free to target whoever they want when publishing on the internet.

There is a good chance that neither you nor HN is a part of that target.

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bheadmaster 5 days ago

> People are free to target whoever they want when publishing on the internet.
People are also free to criticize whatever is published on the internet. Hypotetically not being a part of the "target audience" doesn't preclude one form such freedom.
I agree with the comment above: the introduction doesn't really "introduce" the reader to the language, it only introduces the reader to the syntactic constructs used in the language. Such introduction would better fit in the "specification" section.

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swiftcoder 5 days ago

> There is a good chance that neither you nor HN is a part of that target.
I mean, I'm at least tangentially in the target audience, as an enthusiast of programming language design, who is very fond of Erlang...

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- tossandthrow 5 days ago
  
  It is the assumption that this is meant as dissemination. there is a lot of material online (especially on GitHub) that is not meant to be read.
  It is a valid criticism that it is uninteresting to read, but the core criticism is that this should not have been shared on HN, to which the canonical response is to scroll through and not upvote.
  
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fasten 5 days ago

agreed the focus on whitespace rules and grammar feels misaligned for an introduction

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mirekrusin 5 days ago

...author is Douglas Crockford, creator of JavaScript and JSON.

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thebestjames 5 days ago

Brendan Eich (of more recent Brave fame) is the creator of JavaScript.

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- mirekrusin 5 days ago
  
  Thanks for correction, indeed I mixed him up, Crockford just created JSON parser and popularized this format (he also popularized js in general though his book, linter etc).
  
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exe34 5 days ago

to be fair, if $Y creates $X and $Y doesn't hate $X with a passion and doesn't come up with $Z that is a gazillion times better than $X, then $X is probably not very useful.

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