It's clearly a language designed for people interested in programming languages. Plenty of straightforward examples to show what makes this language interesting/different/worth your time.

But if you're incurious about things that aren't immediately practical (which has sadly been a growing number of HN community in more recent years), you will probably not be interested.

In an era when so much "practical" coding can be offloaded to an LLM, I'm particularly interested in seeing languages that are doing something different even if it makes them initially impractical.

> In an era when so much "practical" coding can be offloaded to an LLM

I see what you did there with the parentheses.

Turned them into quotation marks?

I don't think the project wants any "takers" per se. The first sentence describes it as:

> a novel, maximally-simple concatenative, homoiconic programming and algorithm notation language

This is a toy language designed to showcase a novel programming paradigm.

Personally, I like tech demonstrations, so I scrolled down and found the examples section. That's all I was hoping to get out of this interaction.

Seems totally appropriate to the project. It’s like going to a GitHub repo and scrolling to the Readme.

I would at least update body tag to add basic css to make this more readable:

    <body style="width:80%;margin:auto;">

There is nothing wrong with the site as it is. The text reflows, so you can size your window to any width that you find comfortable. With a decent window manager this is just a few keystrokes at most.

A huge chunk of people don't have, want or care about a "decent window manager" (and many of them are competent developers) and they'll just bail.

Life can be a dream if you don't treat everything as a pitch

It perplexes me that someone would not have a few cookbook style examples above the fold on a website that describes a novel programming language.

Yeah show me the 5-line HTTP server

not that kind of language, it does not even come with integer types or "plus" operator by default.. they do give an example of

    define { minutes { dequote choose {minutes} {} = {:} <-[characters] } } { minutes {1:23} }

which does Python's equivalent of

    "1:23".split(":", 1)[1]

or for a more direct translation:

    def minutes(x): 
        return x[1:] if x[0] == ':' else minutes(x[1:])
    minutes("1:23")

"The Om language is not:

complete. Although the intent is to develop it into a full-featured language, the software is currently at a very early "proof of concept" stage, requiring the addition of many operations (such as basic number and file operations) and optimizations before it can be considered useful for any real-world purpose. It has been made available in order to demonstrate the underlying concepts and welcome others to get involved in early development."

At least it has examples!

I am always kind of surprised when I go to a landing page for a language and there isn't any actual code. This is one of my biggest complaints about the rust language page, it feels crazy to me that there's no code and I think this is just a ridiculous choice (and I know this has been brought up before).

The old page had a built-in sandbox. Go used to have a more "Front and center" sandbox too but at least it's there if you scroll down https://go.dev/

> I am always kind of surprised when I go to a landing page for a language and there isn't any actual code.

So, you're not surprised that this Om page has an extensive section called "Examples", right? https://www.om-language.com/#language__examples__

I didn't scroll that far, and I shouldn't have to.

One time, this annoyed me so much that I made a website.

https://anaminus.github.io/langding/

om would fall under "Yes, must scroll".

Fascinating! It almost seems like the more popular a language is the less likely it is to have syntax on the landing page.

Popular languages don’t have to sell themselves anymore. No one goes to rust or pythons website to see if they would enjoy the syntax

There is code. Small examples start halfway down the page, and there's one 20-line example. Not much, but it's not accurate to say there's none.

It would be helpful to see any kind of motivation for the project though. Anything at all.

On my phone that code is about 250+ lines down, probably 4-5 screens down.

It basically doesn't exist as far as marketing is concerned.

So it just needs a TOC.

No, it needs a 5 line code snippet above the fold.

Or it can have a TOC. It only takes one tap.

marketing isn't concerned, it's an experiment in programming languages. the attention of someone who needs to eyeball the syntax before they understand how to read it has zero value to a project like this.

There is code, search for 'examples'.

It concludes by implementing a fold:

   define
   {
       [Fold]<- {
           rearrange
           {
               rearrange
               {
                   dequote
                   choose
                   quote Result
                   pair pair pair {[Fold]<-} Function Result Remainder
                   Remainder
               }
               {Result Remainder}
               dequote Function Base <-[terms] Source
           }
           {Function Base Source}
        }
   }
   {
       [Fold]<- {[literal]<-} {} {1 2 3}
   }

great example! as someone who writes a Fold function every day, this explains the power of the language very well. ;)

As is clearly explained on the web page, this is not a programming language for everyday tasks, it's an early stage proof of concept that can be used to explore how computer science might be expressed in unusual ways.

Implementing fold would be something of a milestone in such a language.

i'm really not trying to be snarky or anything, but right at the top of the om page it describes the language as concatenative and homoiconic. without searching that or asking an llm, do you know what those terms mean? or what fold is?

could be there's nothing wrong with the page and you're really just not the audience for it. hacker news has many currents, most of which don't interest me, and that's fine, i don't feel the need to weigh in on everything.

splashing code examples at the audience encourages superficial assessments of the language.

Can you please not post shallow dismissals of other people's work? This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. They also ask you not to be snarky.

Nasty swipes like this routinely get upvoted, and then we end up with them at the top of a thread, choking out everything HN is supposed to be for. (I've downweighted it now.)