
Ask HN: Hobby programming language, waste of time? - _RPM
I&#x27;ve been working on a functional language for a couple years now in my spare time. I generally enjoy, although I&#x27;m aware that I&#x27;m not exactly creating any assets that would have monetary value in the future. I sometimes question if there is a point to this. One thing I know is that it&#x27;s not 1990 where people are writing web applications in C. We have many dynamic memory safe languages like Python, PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, etc, so there is no need for yet another dynamically typed language.
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gradschool
It's not a waste of time if you enjoy it and are learning something from it
without any unrealistic expectations about where it might lead. I agree with
you that there isn't any shortage of so called memory safe languages (if by
that you mean languages in which storage management is outside the
programmer's control), so if you're interested attracting a community, I'd
suggest focusing on something that other languages don't do well and also
floats your boat. Is concurrent distributed processing solved to your
satisfaction? How about parser generation? Are there any math or graphics
libraries, web APIs, or low level protocols that deserve to be accessible to
more programmers without specialized knowledge? Can you make monads
comprehensible? One of these might be the killer feature that gets people on
board.

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tony-allan
Keep going, finish the project, publish it on Github and then post back here
so anyone interested can go and have a look.

It may become popular or it might end up with a single programmer. It doesn't
matter. Just do it!

