I was interested in Hare until I found this immensely self-defeating FAQ item: …

Sounds like you and the Hare people have different definitions of success. As for "languages either snowball or fizzle out," I feel like that's pretty dismissive of a lot of languages that have been steadily marching on for decades even without this rockstar status. Not every band has to hit the Billboard charts to be worth listening to.

"The goal of Hare is not to achieve the broadest possible reach, but to be a part of a broader system which effectively achieves Hare’s goals."

It says they won’t officially support Windows or MacOS. Some other project can try to port it if they want, right? It seems good of them to be honest about their intended level of support. Supporting an OS the devs don’t use is a big ask.

On the one hand, I can respect the authors for sticking to what they want to accomplish and not accommodating every demand. On the other hand, that is hardly the only thing from the FAQ that raises one's eyebrows: > we have no package manager and encourage less code reuse as a shared value > qbe generates slower code compared to LLVM, with the performance ranging from 25% to 75% the runtime performance of comparable LLVM-generated code > Can I use multithreading in Hare? Probably not. > So I need to implement hash tables myself? Indeed. Hash tables are a common data structure that many Hare programs will need to implement from scratch. As it stands, this is definitely not a language designed for mass adoption. Which is fine, and at least they're upfront about it.

> But why would I invest in learning a language which imposes an arbitrary purity test on developers? While I understand your concerns, I disagree with your the idea of “imposition”. Someone doing something for free doesn’t owe anyone to do it in a particular way (as long as it’s not malevolent). You’re free to express your opinion, but if the developer has already established his guidelines, criticisms like this is not constructive.

"We cannot effectively study, understand, debug, or improve, the underlying operating system if it is non-free. We actively work with the source code for the systems on which we depend, and we are not interested in supporting any platforms for which this is not possible." I understand that you don't like it, but how do you come to regard a statement like this as "arbitrary?" It's exclusive, for sure. "Purity test" is one way to characterize it. But do you really think that statements like this are just the product of individual caprice? That it's not someone's attempt at a principled intervention, but just an "attitude?"

I don't think that Apple particularly cares about porting their software to Linux. Do you feel the same about Apple? That with such an attitude, they surely cannot succeed?

> Languages either snowball or fizzle out. This is not true and a naive statement. There are quite few languages which are not popular across the board but have a very firm niche in which they thrive and fulfill critical roles.