The home page does happen to have everything necessary: it has a basic examples, a few blurbs, and a "use cases" explanation:
> Janet makes a good system scripting language, or a language to embed in other programs. Think Lua or Guile. Janet also can be used for rapid prototyping, dynamic systems, and other domains where dynamic languages shine.
I could see the sections reordered, but it's hard to really fault this home page, it's pretty terse yet quite complete.
The biggest issue I have with it is the first-time reader is hit by the community / contribution bits before even knowing what the language is about. A two-columns layout would probably be useful there. And while having a basic in-page repl is nice, improving the discoverability of the language through it (e.g. providing autocompletion and inline help) would be neat.
Do you have reading comprehension issues that you mistake examples for explanations and are blind to the actual explanations surrounding the examples?
> I mean if I want Lua, I use Lua.
That I know about Lua doesn't mean I want Lua. Hell, that I wanted lua in the past doesn't mean I'm closed to replacing it with something else. Given how well-known Lua is in the space, "think lua" is a rather good example.
Who knows? But could you point exactly to where it says why I should care about this language? Let's say I want to convince a cto to adopt it, what would be the edge one could/would gain? Maybe it has some exceptional libraries? Or GC pauses are deterministic, or whatever.
I mean this landing page is/should be their 2 minutes sales pitch.
It’s the most voted submission on HN right now. We gather here because we like this stuff.
And here you are wasting your time accusing us of being everything that’s wrong with tech.
The thing you fail to understand is that we aren’t in this for the money or the validation or the status.
We simply like fiddling with computers, languages, etc.
Computers were my hobby way before they were my job.
It's great that you like playing with computers, languages, etc. Nobody is minimizing that. But, many people who see a new computer language want to know what is unique about it.
It is completely valid to ask, "why should I use Janet (the language)?" Many people are familiar with or expert with many programming paradigms and have written their own DSLs or general purpose languages. Others are expert in fields that intersect with languages and want to know if there is specific applicability to their domain.
Seeing a new language that doesn't solve a unique problem or solve a problem in a novel way is often a complete non-starter. For that reason, many people expect a page on a new language to state the purpose of the language, even if the purpose is, "I wanted to play with writing a langauge." That's cool, too.
I'm pretty sure that is why several people have asked that question.
> It is completely valid to ask, "why should I use Janet (the language)?
Note that that isn't the question they started with (and would likely have provoked a different response). Perceived tone matters very much with a one-sentence question.
> Janet makes a good system scripting language, or a language to embed in other programs. Think Lua or Guile. Janet also can be used for rapid prototyping, dynamic systems, and other domains where dynamic languages shine.
I could see the sections reordered, but it's hard to really fault this home page, it's pretty terse yet quite complete.
The biggest issue I have with it is the first-time reader is hit by the community / contribution bits before even knowing what the language is about. A two-columns layout would probably be useful there. And while having a basic in-page repl is nice, improving the discoverability of the language through it (e.g. providing autocompletion and inline help) would be neat.