Hacker News Reader

Comment by chpatrick | Hacker News Reader

I just think making a new language (and therefore new ecosystem) just to make slight changes to syntax is a total waste of time personally.

Unless you really do something profoundly different in terms of type system, memory management etc, you're just making a new thing to learn and an extra nuisance to use if its toolchain sucks. "JavaScript but looks kind of different" doesn't clear that bar for me. We learned that from CoffeeScript.

I don't have any problem with people making languages for fun but to me if you're asking people to deal with the hassle of a new language it better be for a good reason.

View on HN

I seem to haven't learned that yet, as I still use Coffeescript heavily and I'm happy it exists.

It's only one data point, but if it makes even just a few people happy, it already has enough reasons to exist.

    > a new thing to learn and an extra nuisance to use if its toolchain sucks

    > if you're asking people to deal with the hassle of a new language it better be for a good reason

I think the biggest confusion here is that you feel that someone is asking you to use the language, or that the creators of the language are pushing it in people's faces.

Couldn't be further from the truth. The creators build a language for their project (Scrimba.com) and had the nice idea to share it with us. If we find it compelling, we are allowed to use it, give feedback, and contribute to its development if we want it to grow.

I personally can only feel gratitude towards these people.

Sure, people are welcome to use it. I just personally think it's a bad idea.

That's why I created https://civet.dev as a personal slight against chaptrick.

civet looks really nice, especially single argument lambda and spreads in any position

For whatever it's worth, this is interesting as someone who (a) wants to learn to build UIs, (b) doesn't care about getting a front-end job (so I don't care about learning React or whatever to get me a job) and (c) absolutely hates the Javascript bundled-compiling-insanity hell that is modern front-end.

I will absolutely consider any new simplified language and new ecosystem over this garbage that people only use because its pushed by FAANG companies to have enough labour to keep costs down.

So yeah, if you're a front end dev, maybe not worth it, but there are other demographics than hyper-specialized next/nuxt/react/svelte developers who MUST have the most artistic control possible to create little doodads and whatever.

You need to do the bundled-compiling-insanity hell to use this language.

The question isn't what "slight changes to syntax" the language makes now -- it's what the language can develop into over time. Python 30(!) years ago wasn't the same as Python today.

A small community of people might be interested enough in a language to keep it going until it develops into something interesting, or they might not. It's pretty near to classic darwinian evolution. You don't have to pay attention to every new language, and that's okay. If others do, and it grows into something you're interested later, pay attention to it then. For now, you can ignore it.

CoffeeScript brought more to the table than just syntax changes. Some of the recent niceties we have in JavaScript today were influenced by it.

Also, recall that the whole JavaScript ecosystem was kind of a mess when CoffeeScript was created. ES5 happened at around the same time and its predecessor, ES4, had gone nowhere. I don't remember polyfills really being a thing and you couldn't even use `forEach` reliably. Every JS question on StackOverflow used jQuery in the response whether or not you wanted it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com