The quirky personal homepages of programming language creators

63 points by cjlm 15 hours ago on hackernews | 18 comments

If just someone would have come up with a way that allows one to visit these pages by a simple click of a button...

You could just click on them and be there. Imagine how crazy that would be.

It's easy with Firefox: Right-click frame, select This Frame > Open Frame in New Tab.

But I get your point; there should be a one-click link to these pages, especially since some of them don't allow themselves to be opened in an iframe.

: rob74 | 15 hours ago
Ah, ok, that's why many are blank. I imagined that some of them may no longer be maintained, but then I actually tried one directly from pldb.info, and it worked. Well, typical I guess: vibe coded in 5 minutes and then uploaded without even testing it. Why am I even wasting my time writing a comment about this?

vbernat | 14 hours ago

The page from which the data is sourced allows this: http://pldb.info/lists/creators.

: whilenot-dev | 14 hours ago
...and I can click on a name in this list and get to that page. How could that a-tag not have been implemented?

fwlr | 14 hours ago

This page is just a bad[1] reskin of the data on http://pldb.info/lists/creators (which is arranged in the way you and I expect)

1: “A horizontally scrolling list of text items at the top of the page” somehow manages to pick the worse option on every possible binary choice it gets to make.

: userbinator | 14 hours ago
Bad but presumably also "trendy and modern" as it requires JS and a substantially more powerful computer than just rendering an HTML table. The page you link to can be viewed in basically any browser, which is a good thing but not to those who want to turn the web into a walled garden.
From the ones at the top I've looked at, the creators' pages themselves are also basic HTML; and furthermore, it's also telling that #1, the creator of JavaScript, chooses not to turn his site into a JS-only SPA.

exodust | 12 hours ago

You can though, by clicking the name in top left header of the currently open panel.

newsomix9xl | 15 hours ago

too many "$BROWSER can't open these pages" pages and one "no https page" page.

travisgriggs | 14 hours ago

No Alan Kay or Dan Ingalls. Surprised

: travisgriggs | 14 hours ago
Or Jose Valim
: dirkt | 14 hours ago
Original list [1] has both.
Shitty vibe-coded half-functioning copy hasn't...
[1] http://pldb.info/lists/creators

matheusmoreira | 14 hours ago

How do I make it into the list? :)

userbinator | 14 hours ago

Create a programming language.

: matheusmoreira | 13 hours ago
https://github.com/lone-lang/lone
Sent a PR to breck7/pldb and it got merged in less than two minutes.

joshdavham | 13 hours ago

Is there actually a good reason for language creators’ web pages being so quirky(/ugly)?

: dd8601fn | 13 hours ago
I absolutely love that the CSS one is so f’d up that you can’t see their name.
It’s so perfect that I wonder if it’s intentional.
: esseph | 11 hours ago
It's a different type of beauty. The beauty is not the arrangement, it's what was never put into the code because it was never actually required.