I quit my job to work on my programming language
jank-lang.org

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48 points

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Jeaye

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13 hours ago

27 comments

wruza ・ 10 hours ago

I rewrote jank several times, during these eight years, with a different design each time, trying to find something which felt right. I wanted something

I'll be blunt here, I see it as just a proloned phase. You wanted something, we all wanted that something at some point. You're not the only one who sees problems and thinks "it could be done differently, if", that's why you gather auditory. You'll end up realizing that no language can replace all these years, and that the amount of real useful work that could be done in that time with boring tools is mind-boggling compared to what will ever come out of this optimistically. Every new real job brings some new insight into what could make it less job-y and more fun. These problems never end and most solutions do not fit together. Feeling that something is not right and it could be done more <adjectively> is just part of the job. If you truly believe in it and have a reasonable source of financial stability, godspeed. But I think you might be living an illusion that almost every programming enthusiast had at some point.

  • Jeaye ・ 9 hours ago

    Thanks for taking the time to write all of your thoughts on this. Have a good one!

  • tengbretson ・ 6 hours ago

    You're probably right but I'm also glad you're not friends with Rich Hickey.

avbanks ・ 6 hours ago

Love this, do you have an benchmarks around potential performance improvements over JVM clojure?

Gollapalli ・ 9 hours ago

I love it. Send it!

Are you going to build an engine in Jank after you release the language? I think you could do some really interesting things with server-side multiplayer in a clojure-y way.

  • Jeaye ・ 9 hours ago

    I likely will, since I like building engines! It's not something I aim to productize though. Also, the more immediate win will be getting jank into Unity and Unreal.

dyauspitr ・ 11 hours ago

Giving up part time with benefits? Why? Surely those 15-20 hours per week don’t make a significant difference.

  • Jeaye ・ 11 hours ago

    In some ways, it allows me to speed up, since I can focus my full work week on jank. In other ways, it allows me to slow down (to not burn out), since I can stop working nights and through the weekends on jank.

    Previously, Mon->Wed nights and all of Thur->Sun would be for jank dev, since I felt like I didn't have enough time. Now I can focus a more normal Mon->Fri and more easily have space on the weekends to unwind and rejuvenate.

    What could you do with 15-20 hours per week? A lot, I reckon'.

  • diggan ・ 11 hours ago

    There is a big difference between "full immersion" and "sort of full focus", even if the amount of hours difference isn't huge. Edit: Although the post mentions a difference of 3 days, that's not a small difference either.

norir ・ 13 hours ago

From another independent language developer, good luck to you.

I know this may not feel constructive but I'm going to say it anyway: the name of the language is a huge turnoff for me. I try to avoid janky things and use the word as a pejorative. It isn't that different to me than naming the language crap.

  • karmakaze ・ 9 hours ago

    Like CockroachDB? Such names are memorable--you've already memorized it.

    • jonas21 ・ 9 hours ago

      Cockroaches may be gross, but they have the property that they can survive almost anything -- which is of course what you want from a distributed, fault-tolerant database.

      As far as I know, "jank" only has negative connotations, and a quick glance at the website did not provide an alternate interpretation of the name.

      Also, if the author is looking for sponsors, some companies might be reluctant to be a proud sponsor of jank.

      • pbronez ・ 8 hours ago

        Can’t one “juke and jank” as you “zig and zag”?

  • overengineer ・ 11 hours ago

    Ever heard of a program named "git"? It is a British slang

  • Jeaye ・ 12 hours ago

    Much appreciated! Keep at it. :)

  • Koshcheiushko ・ 11 hours ago

    Yeah. Jank sounds like Junk. OP should consider changing it into some short form like J.

    • Jeaye ・ 11 hours ago

      J is my name though!

mark_l_watson ・ 12 hours ago

I wish you good luck. Except for perhaps 2 1/2 years as a paid Clojure developer over the last 20 years, I don’t much use Clojure for the important stuff: my side projects.

I have been following your project for a while but haven’t tried getting it installed on macOS yet. Clojure is a cool language and having a native code option is a nice contribution.

I also like the “Clojure like” language Hy, or hylang.

kdfjgbdfkjgb ・ 12 hours ago

why do you not capitalize your language's name?

  • Jeaye ・ 12 hours ago

    I find it more aesthetically pleasing when it's lowercase.

fithisux ・ 5 hours ago

"Clojure and Rust were the only two which had real staying power"

rephrase in generic terms

"Lisp and SML were the only two which had real staying power"

These two languages are the pillars of high-level programming languages, period.

  • Jeaye ・ 3 hours ago

    You could say that, but not all lisps are the same. I've tried a few different lisps and schemes, both, but the only one I've found enjoyable is Clojure. This is mainly due to its functional-first approach, immutable data structures, and common abstrations for transformations (so that I don't need to care if I have a vector or a set or a map, I can just conj onto it).

    • fithisux ・ 2 hours ago

      I referred to those as generic/conceptual terms. Each class has it superstar object.

eduction ・ 11 hours ago

> I get DMs, emails, etc regularly with people asking if jank is ready for them to use. I've spoken with founders and tech leads of dozens of companies, at various Clojure conferences and meet ups, who are interested in using jank to solve performance, efficiency, usability, or interop problems with Clojure.

I’d be very curious how much interest is people looking to move to a Clojure from non Clojure code, and in those cases what domain they are working in (games?). And also how much is people in jvm Clojure looking / hoping for better performance from a c++ Clojure and in that case also curious what domains they are in (I’d naively expect jvm is better for Clojure webdev performance given jvm is historically optimized for webdev).

  • Jeaye ・ 8 hours ago

    So far, almost all interest comes from within the Clojure community. Getting people from outside of Clojure requires a lot of education around Lisps, FP, data-oriented programming, interactive programming, etc. It's a whole paradigm shift. I will tackle that, but I'm starting within the Clojure community first.

    Mainly, the people interested in jank are the same folks interested in making Graal native images from their uberjars, combined with the folks interested in using some native lib from their Clojure code, combined with people who use Clojure reluctantly because they don't like the JVM. jank is significantly lighter, faster to start up, and has competitive runtime performance compared to the JVM.

    Clojure is fast because of the JVM, not because it's a great compiler/runtime. jank is fast because of LLVM, yes, but also because a lot of work is going into the compiler/runtime to make it fast.