I don't think that Pony is claiming to be novel in the area of syntax?

If “reference capabilities” are the important thing about Pony, they should have a max 100-200 LoC example on the front page that uses them.

As far as I can tell reading here, “reference capabilities” don’t do anything that properly-used C semaphores haven’t done for near half a century. Or that their abstraction of that isn’t nicer to use than, say, Elixir’s, or better than Rust’s borrow checker for managing mutability. A code example could convince me otherwise.

Show us code that uses “reference capabilities” to do something. This “the syntax doesn’t matter” talk just comes off as bullshit to devs wanting to actually use a language. It would be better to commit to a syntax, post some damn examples on the site, and let devs get used to “reference capabilities.” If the syntax needs revising, just do that in Pony v2.

If you want devs to be enthusiastic about your language, make it easy for them to understand why they should be enthusiastic. That means code, front and center, first thing.

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dismalaf 4 days ago | parent [-]

A high performance Actor-based language is fairly unique. Pony is also very fast for a garbage collected language.

Also the syntax is great, probably my favourite language ever syntactically. Dunno why there's a pointless argument about it in these comments...

The reference capabilities are fairly novel as well. Apart from the lack of tooling, writing in Pony is great.

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pphysch 4 days ago | parent [-]

If the syntax is great (I agree it doesn't seem bad at first glance) then the website attempting to sell the language should quickly demonstrate that syntax and capabilities. This is what the argument was about. "Can we see the syntax without clicking a dozen links?" "No, the syntax is not important."

	▲	dismalaf 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Or 3rd option, the syntax is great but the creators are poor website designers because they came from the finance industry writing high performance back end systems...