The $LANG Programming Language

This afternoon I posted some tips on how to present a new* programming language to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46608577. It occurred to me that HN has a tradition of posts called "The {name} programming language" (part of the long tradition of papers and books with such titles) and it might be fun to track them down. I tried to keep only the interesting ones:

https://news.ycombinator.com/thelang

Similarly, Show HNs of programming languages are at https://news.ycombinator.com/showlang.

These are curated lists so they're frozen in time. Maybe we can figure out how to update them.

A few famous cases:

The Go Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=934142 - Nov 2009 (219 comments)

The Rust programming language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1498528 - July 2010 (44 comments)

The Julia Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3606380 - Feb 2012 (203 comments)

The Swift Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7835099 - June 2014 (926 comments)

But the obscure and esoteric ones are the most fun.

(* where 'new' might mean old, a la https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23459210)

61 points | by dang 1 hour ago

4 comments

  • johnfn 9 minutes ago
    This is a fun false positive :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34675259
  • dang 1 hour ago
    Yikes, I tanked HN's performance by posting this! Probably because of loading all those old threads over and over.

    I've moved the URL out of the link at the top, which seems to be helping for now.

    (now I have to decide whether to go down another rabbit hole and fix that)

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  • GaryBluto 1 hour ago
    Very useful! Thanks for the addition.
  • wizzwizz4 1 hour ago
    So these are just static pages, not new entries for https://news.ycombinator.com/lists?
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    • dang 1 hour ago
      Alas, yes, at least for now. Seems like an LLM could be good at finding them though. A regex is probably too crude.
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      • wizzwizz4 19 minutes ago
        The old lesson from the Wizard of Oz experiment says that a regular expression probably isn't too crude, if you're willing to take the time to design it. Though you could probably get away with running a regex golf algorithm (e.g. https://nbviewer.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313.ipynb) over the list of matching titles, and the union of some list of non-matching-but-close titles (chosen to get good discrimination) with some list of way-off titles (to avoid overfitting). (You could treat the whole HN title database, other than the ones you've identified, as losers, but that risks hardcoding the absence of a post you accidentally missed, and would also take slightly longer – though Peter Norvig's first algorithm takes time linear in the number of losers, so it might not be too expensive. I don't know how expensive his improved versions are, given large lists of losers: https://nbviewer.org/url/norvig.com/ipython/xkcd1313-part2.i.... Better algorithms are surely available.)