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This is just another symptom of why OpenSource often sucks. Instead of somehow coordinating and focusing their efforts, everyone seems to need to start their own spin off "inspired" by other projects.

When do people realize that building a new language is almost always going to fail and only very very few languages ever reach anything close to adoption.

Instead of spending all this time writing your own doomed language, why not try to contribute to a project like LLVM or Rust and add your provable subset there?

The same goes for Linux, which is the paradigm of wasted efforts.



Bjarne Stroustrup never expected C++ to be very widely used. He made it anyway.

Alex Stepanov never thought that anyone would care about his ideas on generic programming. He pursued them anyway. They became the STL.

True, building a new language is almost always going to fail. The problem is, when someone starts working on a new language, they don't know if it's doomed or not. It is good that 1000 people try, because from that we get one language that many people use, and 10 specialized languages that a few people use, and 10 languages that nobody uses but future people steal some of the ideas.

> The same goes for Linux, which is the paradigm of wasted efforts.

Um... what? Wasted because nobody uses it? Very much no. Wasted because it's a duplication of what was there before? To some degree, yes. But not everything in Linux was in Unix before it. And Unix couldn't run all the places that Linux does (smartphones to mainframes). So, no, Linux is not wasted effort.


Just an example of why things don't go the way seem to feel they must:

I do things that are not for work, because I want to do them. I enjoy designing and implementing languages, I love writing compilers and interpreters. So, I don't care one bit if anyone ever sees them or uses them. Of those languages I've designed, the only language I consider minimally complete is one I designed for personal use on personal projects. I have been arguing with friends recently who want me to at least release it to the public, if only to post about it and its quirks on blogs.

I would be utterly shocked if anyone ever wanted to use anything I've built for fun/research, that's why I've never released any of it. Also because of the assumption you make being quite popular, that I somehow owe Open Source or something to help them do things that are interesting to them.

Additionally, telling a developer who is developing what they want for their own reasons to contribute to a project like LLVM or Rust is ridiculous. If these projects aren't what drew my interest why would I want to bend over backwards to change what I'm doing to try and fit it into some existing model.

TL;DR --> I don't program outside of my job for anyone but myself, and that's all that matters. If the ZZ devs want to make a provable dialect of C, that's what they should do.




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