I strongly doubt that, most people would look at it and say it was a concatenative language (it’s not, but that is a semantics issue) and immediate disregard. The language, while being a modal dependently typed language, there is no mandatory ‘safety’ features and memory is largely manually managed. And after the blowback, complaints, and negativity posts about Hare on HN, I just don’t care to argue the fact that my language exists.
There is a group of programming language enthusiasts that would be interested in all sorts of languages.
Then there are people who will criticize just about anything for the sake of doing it. Just ignore those people and make a day more interesting for the people who share your passions.
That is the argument that has been made by my few friends who are interested in PLT as well. The other option I’ve considered if starting a blog or similar (although my son keeps suggesting a YouTube channel) and doing a longer series of posts concerning the language, type theory, and category theory inspirations present in the semantics of the language.
I would love to imagine I could be the next Andrew Kelly (creator of Zig), I don’t know that I can actually be a language founder.
I get it that programming languages are quite different from most of other projects in that normal projects can have a small user base and still be considered a success in solving a given problem, but with programming languages the mere fear of not being able to reach a sizeable community is enough to not even try out a new approach.
Nevertheless I think there is space for experimental/research languages. Just don't burden yourself thinking in terms of "this is the next great thing" and it will be fun, and perhaps your work and the ideas underlying it will even leave a mark, even if that doesn't necessarily mean that the particular incarnation of that particular language will ever reach adoption.
We not only stand on the shoulder of giants. We all stand on the shoulders of billions of dwarfs.
