The $LANG Programming Language

94•dang•3h ago

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, of course - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23459210)

Comments

GaryBluto•3h ago

Very useful! Thanks for the addition.

wizzwizz4•3h ago

So these are just static pages, not new entries for https://news.ycombinator.com/lists?

dang•3h ago

Alas, yes, at least for now. Seems like an LLM could be good at finding them though. A regex is probably too crude.

wizzwizz4•2h 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.)

dang•3h 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)

johnfn•2h ago

This is a fun false positive :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34675259

dang•1h ago

Whoops! I tried to catch those but yes.

chuckadams•1h ago

For a moment I thought there was actually a new language called $LANG, which would have been wonderful.

trollbridge•1h ago

I was thinking how it would be odd to have a programming language called en_AU.UTF-8.

mixmastamyk•1h ago

  echo “G’day World!”

edoceo•1h ago

*G'day mate

Lammy•6m ago

There's a language called SLang inside Goldman Sachs used for their SecuritiesDB, and that's how I read it at first glance even with the dollar sign lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Dubno#SecDB

macintux•1h ago

I feel like there’s an Advent of Code challenge lurking here.

jeswin•1h ago

I did a Show HN for a language called Tsonic yesterday, which is a variant of TypeScript (all tsonic is valid typescript) requiring stronger typing which compiles to x64/ARM native code via .Net/NativeAOT. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46604308

It didn't appear in Show HN at all. Perhaps because another user posted it as a regular topic just a few minutes earlier, which drops off very quickly (within minutes) - but I think the issue is wider.

For a while now, I've felt that the new topics stream requires you to promote the topic outside of HN to be seen on HN - sometimes by adding a "Discuss on HN" link in the blog, or on social networks etc. The problem is quite fundamental: the "Show" link gets a small fraction of clicks. The "Show New" (two clicks away) probably gets tinier, miniscule fraction of clicks. The intersection of people who are interested in the project and those who have clicked "Show New" would be very nearly null. So upvotes will have to come from outside.

•32m ago

zahlman•17m ago

That reminds me, I really should blog my design ideas for my spiritual successor to Python....

The $LANG Programming Language

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The $LANG Programming Language

Comments

The $LANG Programming Language

Ask HN: Quantum Computation, Computers and Programming

Ask HN: Iran's 120h internet shutdown, phones back. How to stay resilient?

Ask HN: ADHD – How do you manage the constant stream of thoughts and ideas?

Ask HN: Vxlan over WireGuard or WireGuard over Vxlan?

Ask HN: Discrepancy between Lichess and Stockfish

Ask HN: Looking for Windows contributors for meeting-detection engine

Tell HN: DigitalOcean's managed services broke each other after update

Ask HN: What are you working on? (January 2026)

Ask HN: Who remembers AWS Spot's auction era before the 2017 pricing change?

Ask HN: 500 citation MSc CS, stuck in a low-trust region. How to move forward?

Tell HN: The Google Tenor GIF API has been shut down

Ask HN: Learning Discoverability

Tell HN: The insane price hike of internal SSDs

Tell HN: Intel could blow up the Console Wars if it had the guts

Ask HN: Does anyone else think that humanoid robots is a bubble?

Is "AI vibe coding" making prototyping worse inside real companies?

Ask HN: Are you underutilizing your insurance too?

Ask HN: What made you move back to HTML-to-PDF in production?

Unpopular Opinion: Bootstrap is a better front-end framework than Tailwind

Eleva.js – A 2.3KB JavaScript framework with signals and no virtual DOM

Experiment: Using NotebookLM as a cynical code reviewer (via custom prompts)

Gh Account Permabanned – Help?

Ask HN: Story about a CEO going off on a user who left feedback?

Ask HN: How do you prevent AI agents from going rogue in production?

Ask HN: Salesforce, SAP, or ServiceNow: Which Is Most Ripe for Disruption?

My casual chat with AI about cancer led to an internal prototype named"Onco-Bus"

Ask HN: Where is all the protest music?

Ask HN: Job seekers, what's working / not working?

Ask HN: When has a "dumb" solution beaten a sophisticated one for you?