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mccoybtoday at 1:18 PM4 repliesview on HN

I'm not sure where or how to convey this, because I've seen several of these languages designed with AI, documentation created using AI, etc -- posted on Hacker News in the last months or so, and I've responded to each one with roughly the same feedback (and I'm assuming good faith: that the intent is that the poster wishes to grow as a language designer).

Your audience, or whoever you aim your work at, should be treated with respect. Otherwise, why should they give you the time of day? Why would you expect them to respond positively to effort alone when effort (in code and in shit prose) is extremely cheap right now? Their time is not cheap ...

When I read the documentation, and it is extremely clear that you haven't taken the time to clarify your ideas, when much of it is LLM prose, when much of the content introduces highfalutin ideas without motivation, blending categorical concepts (which, by the way, should never be mixed with vague prose claims about the language), violating my reader context model, preventing me from understanding what problem exactly your language design is solving (where is that problem stated clearly?), it is a waste of my time.

> The work took 3 weeks in total ... it's worth a look, and I hope it will win some converts, and that someone will want to help me with its development.

You've gone too fast, too much is vague, nothing is clear.

I'd delete everything, start over, and try and explain just one of the ideas clearly. Seriously. This sounds harsh, but it's honestly the correct approach to something as subtle and nuanced as programming language design.


Replies

VoidWarrantytoday at 5:25 PM

This reads to me like someone's mania project. I wish OP the best and hope they can get some rest.

skulktoday at 3:05 PM

> Your audience, or whoever you aim your work at, should be treated with respect.

I just want to amplify this point. As I was reading this, the LLMisms kept jumping out at me and each one felt like the author looking at me and deciding that my time spent reading this prose wasn't actually worth anything to them.

OP: I want YOUR thoughts, not the next token predictions of a gigantic pile of matrix multiplications. I want your awkward sentences, grammar mistakes, half-baked thoughts, self-doubt, silly jokes. I don't want this pile of grandiose mechanical slop completely devoid of humanity.

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nathan_comptontoday at 5:23 PM

I have to second this. I find the AI written documentation extremely loathsome, hard to read, and somehow both pretentious and lazy.

Please, I beg everyone, stop posting AI slop.

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danieltanfh95today at 4:30 PM

This isn’t about whether the writer uses LLM or not at all, nor is it about respect. The core novelty it tries to introduce is not hard to understand (even if it is not really that novel). If you don’t want to spend time thinking about what interesting idea it is exploring, that is fine, but pretending or insinuating that it is a LLM problem is just lazy.

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