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Comment by kccqzy | Hacker News Reader

> Mercury is a logic/functional programming language which combines the clarity and expressiveness of declarative programming with advanced static analysis and error detection features.

This sentence on the front page succinctly tells me exactly what to expect: the main programming paradigm (logic, functional) and its main strength (performant declarative programming). So I can imagine the language pretty well. I might not know the syntax at all, but yet I can imagine, on an AST level, how known snippets might look like. In any case showing a snippet of Hello World doesn't say much about the language itself; it at best conveys some information about syntactic choices that one gets used to very quickly.

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I actually consider this statement very poor. It only appeals to programming language nerds with a wide array of experience. I see a ton of languages make this mistake, of telling me a bunch of features or properties of their language, expecting me to be interested in them for their own sake.

In order to understand this value proposition, you have to know what logic programming, functional programming, and declarative programming are and the relative strengths and weaknesses of each. Also it has a bunch of qualifiers that don't add much to the description. I know what static analysis is, but what is advanced static analysis? You also seem to have intuited that the language is performant, but that is not at all implied here.

A better statement to me would convey exactly what kind of workloads I might want to use Mercury for. As a user, I have something I want to get done, be that processing data, writing a game, or writing a network driver. I don't care about static analysis or logic programming per se. But I would if you told me it would make writing my game easier.

Yeah, what I was referring to when I mentioned marketing and communication design in another thread. You don't have to make false claims, you just have to shape your wording and content in order to target the right people in a more reliable way.

You probably are not the target audience then, its not that the author owes you a personal favor of any kind let alone tie everything in a bow and land it on your lap.

Plenty of people got something out of that page.

The page in general is okay. IMO they should actually lead with the second paragraph, which does mention performance, and some things you might want to do with it. They should combine that with the call out that's strangely floating off to the side that states "Mercury is a general purpose language intended to support the creation of large, reliable and efficient applications."

Here, I'll give it a shot:

"Mercury is a general purpose logic programming language that supports the development of large, reliable, efficient applications through static program analysis and a tunable execution algorithm"

From this one sentence I get the what (logic programming) why (for large reliable apps) and how (static analysis, customizable execution). Now I'm interested.

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