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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

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dang·

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?

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

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

It's older than that. I won't say how I know, but bits and pieces of this were tumbling around in the undergrad hivemind of a certain Pittsburgh university for awhile before 2011. ;)

> "I won't say how I know"

Why so mysterious? ;)

Do you have a pointer to anything that predates the link I provide? From what I gather, that's the website of one of the listed authors. If you have an earlier link to something that looks like an earlier draft, that would be nice to have for us armchair internet historians.

I remember seeing it back when I was interested in programming language design. I lost interest around 2010 (after concluding largely what the checklist was getting at, that there's no point developing a new programming language), so that would put it in the 2005-2010 period.

Ironically, most of the languages I've used in the last 5 years (Swift, Rust, Kotlin) post-date that period, so I was wrong in my conclusion.

I'm one of the three original co-authors. It was written in early October 2011, just a few days before it was first posted on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3099979

I'm glad it's stood the test of ~8 years time so far.

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