I have learned to check on some basic facts before committing a huge block of time to another pointless exercise. The world seems mostly to have learned to serve up way more pointless exercises.
One choice is to just ignore everything, which almost always produces the right answer. But that will miss the thing that would have been worth looking into. Another choice is to try ways to filter out chaff. What is not a possible choice is to dig into everything that might conceivably be interesting.
One thing we can always be sure of: if it is meant to appeal mainly to C coders, it will fall flat, because everybody who is still using C has seen a thousand languages go by and passed on all of them.
I filter it a bit differently. There are enough people who will check out new language X; I don't have to. If it has merit, I'll keep hearing about it. Sure, I'll miss out on using X the first year or two out of the gate, but I don't actually need that. Yes, if X is all it's cracked up to be, I could have benefited from using it in that year or two. On the other hand, I didn't waste time learning a bunch of new languages trying to find the one that would be more useful than what I already have.
That is the "ignore everything new" choice. You are pointing out its lack of downside. On many days I would agree. (But you didn't. You spent enough time on it for this.)
If in fact the language would have turned out to be interesting, helping out early might make the difference between its fizzling out or getting traction. And, helping out might be a chance to learn a lot, or to ensure it will scratch your itch.
In this case, for me, none of that seems likely. As usual.
> But you didn't. You spent enough time on it for this.
Fair, to a point. But writing an HN comment is a bit lower investment than learning a new language well enough to evaluate it fairly.
> If in fact the language would have turned out to be interesting, helping out early might make the difference between its fizzling out or getting traction.
You may have that kind of pull; I don't. Nobody is going to care whether I like a language or not.
> And, helping out might be a chance to learn a lot, or to ensure it will scratch your itch.
That's somewhat more likely than me helping it gain traction. And, in fact, the earlier the input, the more influence it has at bending the language in the direction you want, because there's fewer voices at that stage. But there are too many potential languages for me to do that with very many of them, so we're back at the problem of choosing which ones to invest in...
(I once did take your approach, with the C++ STL, when was first announced on the newsgroups. It wasn't part of the compiler yet - it was a separate download. I found a bug in the initialization of the random number generator used to random-shuffle vectors. I, some random nobody on the net, emailed Stepanov and Lee, and got three fixes in the next two hours. I was amazed at the response. And the fix made it usable for what I was trying to do with it.
I think that's the only time I've invested in something brand new, though...)
I meant: one could do some of the work needed to make it ready for use. If not done, the language fizzles. Fizzling is the normal fate of any language, absent the miracle.
Hare looks a tiny bit better than C. That was D's problem: it was a tiny bit better than C++; now C++ is much, much better than what D had targeted. If you make Hare enough better than C to merit attention, it will be different enough for the C stalwarts to reject, but not powerful enough for C++ and Rust refugees to wash up onto.
One choice is to just ignore everything, which almost always produces the right answer. But that will miss the thing that would have been worth looking into. Another choice is to try ways to filter out chaff. What is not a possible choice is to dig into everything that might conceivably be interesting.
One thing we can always be sure of: if it is meant to appeal mainly to C coders, it will fall flat, because everybody who is still using C has seen a thousand languages go by and passed on all of them.