Helping promote the Lax programming language

2 pointsposted 25 days ago
by Mavox-ID

Item id: 46600699

6 Comments

dang

25 days ago

(I'm a moderator here. You and your colleagues are welcome on Hacker News. Anyone making a new programming language is a good addition to our community!)

HN readers are very interested in new programming languages, but the way this post is written is not the best way to present your work. Your best bet would be to add some pages to your website that give more of an intellectual (not commercial or promotional) exposition of your project: how/why you came to work on this, describing the design choices involved, and giving a nice set of real examples for people to look over. Make sure to put a few code samples on whatever page you submit as the link to HN, because that's the first thing people will look for.

On your github it says: "The Lax programming language is used to create programs for Linux, operating systems, and kernels, and Lax is used for direct execution by the processor.". I don't understand all of that, but if you went into detail about what you mean there, that could be interesting to people.

Emphasize what's different about your language, i.e. what design tradeoffs you've made, and how they make certain kinds of programs easier to write. That is always of interest.

Don't make dramatic claims and don't try to 'sell' your language to HN. Our audience is pretty cynical about being sold to. Rather, try to interest them intellectually (and let them to do the selling part themselves!) You won't get far asking for help to promote your language, but if you interest the community, you might awaken a wish to participate.

If you use HN Search to go through past threads on "The $LANG programming language" (with $LANG as whatever language name), you'll get a sense of which types of posts do well and generate the best discussions. (Edit: well here you go, I did it for you: The $LANG Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/thelang, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610557.)

Edit: here are a few comments users have posted in the past in response to new-programming-language posts - they give an idea of the kind of things one should take care of in advance:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46084237 (Nov 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44047724 (May 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41820548 (Oct 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38570711 (Dec 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36629455 (July 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36031433 (May 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36031398 (May 2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14076776 (April 2017)

Good luck!

Mavox-ID

24 days ago

Hello, moderator! I read your message and wanted to ask you for links to similar comments about people who created their own programming language so I could understand how to properly comment. Don't worry about the website; it's constantly updated, and documentation is currently being developed for Lax, detailing its commands and providing examples of each command. This will help me learn Lax syntax and be able to write anything instantly after reading the documentation.

All the problems that people see in Lax can be easily solved through updates. Lax was created as an ultra-light language that can be written almost immediately after downloading and does not require additional installation of various libraries. It was also created for writing programs on Linux as a binary file that can be used as a program. It is because of this feature that Lax updates commands and adds new ones to make it easy to do anything with it. Unfortunately, only the CLI version of all written programs is currently supported, but in the future, it is planned to add the gui command and others for interacting with the system through the GUI and UI, and not just the CLI through the terminal.

gus_massa

25 days ago

Clicky:

https://lax-lang.space It has a link to SourceForge instead of GitHub

https://github.com/lax-inc/Lax

> Please create your own project forks or empty repositories with .lx files

Do you mean "new" instead of "empty"? My recomendation is to try to get real users instead of asking minimal repos.

Remember to use two spaces to activate the magic "code" mode in HN

  [start
    [spot op_raw [input "Select operation (+, -, , /, sqrt, expt): "]]
    [spot op [string->sign op_raw]]
    [spot is_unary [eq? op [string->sign "sqrt"]]]
    ...
  ]
Some functions like "eq?" use a question mark and other like "is_unary" use an underscore. It's strange.

From github

> License and Restrictions

> No License.

> All rights are reserved by Lax Inc.

> Copying is strictly prohibited.

> The redistribution of source code, binaries, or the Lax compiler logic is not permitted.

> Unauthorized use of the Lax trademark or the Lax REPL CLI interface design is forbidden.

Are you selling the compiler? IIUC I can only stare at the compiler code but not download or run it. Seling compilers is very hard now. People expect an open source license, but it's hard to monetize. Some people tried with "semi-free"[1] licenses. Who can use your compiler for free? Who must pay to use it?

[1] or "semi-close", depending who is complaining. The only truly free part is to get voluntaries for complaining.

Mavox-ID

25 days ago

Lax is completely open source and uses the MIT license. You can download the release from Github: https://github.com/lax-Inc/Lax/releases/tag/6.0.6 . However, I warn you that Lax is currently only for Linux, and you can build it with Conda Make or, for more details, use Make Help. I asked you to create an empty Github repository where you will create a project with a file with the .lx extension and a detailed README.md about the project (not what you used in the code, but what it does and why. We recommend checking the code using the Lax argument: -o and uploading it to Github). The most important thing is that the project is empty and uses a minimum of an .lx file with code written in Lax and a README.md explaining the program at a minimum. The rest is up to you. (Just don't mention that this is help for Lax; the project should be about interest in using the Lax programming language, not about help.)

Any questions regarding eq? In code, eq? checks whether two values point to the same object in memory (referential identity). In other functions, it's the check code itself, created earlier, not the function itself. (It's like a variable that participates as a command but is itself executed via spor. If used, it executes another command, such as eq? , but with the value entered by the user.)

For example:

[spot [is_true [x] [x]] eq? [x] [x]]

And more.

The fact that you found Sourceforge is one of the ways to download Lax, which is currently temporarily non-existent. You can download it using the button right at the beginning of the site 'Download Lax 6.0.6'. What you saw in README.md was a test version of Lax and did not apply to the current version at all. Lax currently uses MIT and you can download and edit Lax as you like and even suggest your changes through forks of the official repository. Lax is compiled very quickly using make and is not sold. Lax is simply provided in the form of only .c code, where you compile it yourself and is not immediately submitted only as a binary file, where you cannot open it like the same .c code and edit it.

Calavar

24 days ago

> Lax is completely open source and uses the MIT license.

I see that there is an MIT license file in the repo, but the readme in the repo still says there is no license and redistribution in source or binary form is explicitly forbidden. This is a discrepancy that should probably be addressed

Mavox-ID

24 days ago

The problem with README.md was caused by our moderator, we have already fixed README.md