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Comment by staticassertion | Hacker News Reader

> The reason they don’t is because I asked them not to, and we maintain a mutual understanding regarding the need for privacy.

This is the only sane definition.

But otherwise I don't totally get the point of this post. "We're private for reasons XYZ, please don't share it" followed by "reach out if you want to work on it". And all we know about the language is that the goal is "simplicity".

So, ok.

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Likewise.

I'm afraid years of seeing people talk in great detail, in public, around the edges of something they "aren't ready to talk about" has led only to greater disappointment or greater cynicism.

Conversations like this in private, sure.

A straight recruitment post for contributors to a private project? Yeah.

This sort of thing? Come back when you're ready to talk about it. It's fine, we all have our own thing going on!

[Edit for weird tiredness error]

Remember the Segway?

Sure, that's the thing that was going to revolutionise transport and is now used to to play polo at corporate team-building days, right?

Not sure what you're getting at here. Is it your contention that Kamen talked about it too soon, or too late?

The Segway got a lot of pre-announcement hype. It was referred to as "It" and a lot of well-connected people were allowed to see It and talked It up (at least in quotes splashed around the news) and the hype was way too much for the actual thing. Which got a "That's it?" response from most people and the press. It was supposed to be revolutionary, as big as the PC. It was a scooter.

It was revolutionary in the self-balancing aspect.

I don't think it's the hype cycle that killed the Segway so much as the unwillingness of really any national government or major municipality to encourage people to whizz around on pavements using a powered device.

Nowadays, regrettably, that horse has bolted, and all sorts of sociopaths think foopaths are the right place for their badly-maintained future-electrical-fire on wheels!

Self-balancing may have been revolutionary, but not as revolutionary as the PC, which is how it was playing out in the news at the time (pre-announcement). Though maybe that's a matter of opinion, but I doubt most people think that a self-balancing scooter is going to change the world, which is how it was getting hyped up. The hype really did help kill it because expectations were way too high, and the cost ($5000 or so, used car prices), and then it ended up with the public image as the thing tourists and mall cops used.

> It was revolutionary in the self-balancing aspect.

What exactly did it revolutionize?

Ah yes... "Project Ginger" was promised to fully revolutionize society, bigger than the Internet, etc. People do seem to forget how old the tech-hype circus is, and with a lot of the same promises, always "too early yet" with the promised benefits lying just around the corner.

> But otherwise I don't totally get the point of this post.

Reverse psychology? "Please don't look at my language!"

A quick googling finds this: https://harelang.org/

My first impression is that it's somewhere in the trade space around Go and Zig.

> Reverse psychology

Seems to have been effective here on HN. It worked on me.

There's a social media trick where you make some really obvious mistake (eg pronounce "Mario" as "mah-RYE-oh" in a video) and then rely on people's "well akshully" in the comments causing you to go viral. Regardless if it's intentional or not, it's probably working since this already has 18 comments after only being posted a half hour ago hahah

> Cunningham's Law states "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law.

I feel like Drew doesn't need to try a reverse psychology approach. He could just post it.

Anyway, I definitely have plenty of thoughts about this language but I don't think anyone working on it would care, so I'll refrain.

and it uses qbe as compiler backend, which is very interesting.

I read the first design principle and I'm already done. The programmer should the last person to trust.

I can't tell why you're being this petty. The man explicitly asked for people to respect his wish of the project being public but not advertised.

If a quick search leads anyone to find it, why not leave it at that? The ones who are interested will find it. All you did was to be be contrarian for no good reason.

And to answer parent's question with my own impression: the post serves to tell people like me (that tangentially knew the language is in development) that work is being done, and if any of us has more than a cursory interest, they can get in touch to help. It also serves to tell people that are not immediately interested in helping that spreading the word about the project is not encouraged. I can't think of why there needs to be more of a "point" than this.

There doesn't have to be a point. It just seemed really odd, so I pointed out that it was odd. I also refrained from commenting on the language as I had understood it.

So like... Drew Streisand Effect'd himself here?

Writing a big post about your secret language to a tech crowd seems like a really bad idea. People like puzzles.

If I squint a bit I could interpret it as asking for help but at the same time he throws up a barrier to keep out the people that don't have the skills or the motivation to put in the work. It sort of makes sense.

Over the past two years there have been multiple public posts on his blog about the language, you can learn a lot about it from there.

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