Ask HN: Do you do anything with the "cool" languages that get posted here?

3 points by AstroJetson 280 days ago | 2 comments

I was reading Hackaday about yet another Lisp and some other language mash-up. https://hackaday.com/2025/08/09/learn-c-with-a-lisp/

And got reminded of Forsp by this Hackaday article, https://hackaday.com/2024/06/13/forsp-a-forth-lisp-hybrid-lambda-calculus-language/ that pointed to the article here a year ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40633003 about Forsp. https://xorvoid.com/forsp.html

I'm a Forth fan and dabbled in Lisp in the 80's And I remember playing with Forsp and thinking that it could be cool for embedded systems, but then my day$job got my attention and I didn't do anything with it.

But this go around I was thinking, whatever happens to these languages? Forsp got some love with a few fixes and additions (it now returns a 0 on a successful run). And from the HN comments more than a few people tried it out. But there hasn't been any follow on info and it seems to be languishing.

When you see these "cool" languages do you try them out? Have you fallen in love with one and use it when you can? If so what one(s) did you find/use.

If you are a proud parent of one of these languages, did it take off or are you still looking for some of us to get excited about it?

sargstuff 279 days ago |

> Ask HN: Do you do anything with the "cool" langauges that get posted here?

Categorize & move them to [0].

> When you see these "cool" languages do you try them out?

Check out ways to combine with various other miscellaneous domain specific languages[3]

"doom"d programming can make trying out the "cool" language/domain specific langauge a bit easier. aka 'doom' pdf & javascript port[1]; psdoom [2]

-------------------

[0] : https://esolangs.org/wiki/Esolang:Categorization

[1] : pdfdoom : http://hackaday.com/2025/01/15/nice-pdf-but-can-it-run-doom-...

[2] : psdoom : http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/

[3] : domain specific languages : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language

JohnFen 279 days ago |

> When you see these "cool" languages do you try them out?

Sometimes, but not usually. I'll try out a new language if there's something about the language that I find compelling (it can be technical, syntactic, or even just that the language amuses me) or if it looks like it will ease some actual problem I'm having. Otherwise, I wont.