Thread

Bend – a language that blocks AI mistakes via proof and runs on GPUs

616 points · 327 comments · nicolas-siplis

plastic041 · 1789694610 · focus · HN ↗
This project's repo has 20K stars with only 500 forks, with less than 300 issues(including closed). Something's not right.
Compared to other programming languages:
- Gleam: 22K stars, 1K forks, 3K issues
- V: 38K stars, 2.3K forks, 11K issues
- Ruby: 23K stars, 5.6 forks, 19K issues
- Zig: 43K stars, 3K forks, 14K issues
It got 16K stars just in 4 months too. <a href="https://www.star-history.com/?repos=bendlang%2Fbend" rel="nofollow">https://www.star-history.com/?repos=bendlang%2Fbend
Also how would anyone trust this? I've never seen a programming language that doesn't have 1) changelogs 2) way to download older versions 3) commit history.
I don't understand why the author thought deleting the commit history was a good idea. Imagine seeing this project for the first time. It's a repo with 20K stars, but no commits, and suspiciously few issues and PRs. It doesn't look legitimate.
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I'm not familiar with academic procedures, but a pdf on a repo, written by Fable and has no reviews, doesn't seem like a proper 'paper' to me.
1. 0x69420 · 1789695646 · focus · HN ↗
  victor's legit and people have been excited about his work for years; squashing the history was just a bit of an optics oopsie on his part. the star to fork ratio makes perfect sense for something like bend.
  - fstar: 3k stars, 267 forks
  - coalton: 1.8k stars, 111 forks
  - carp: 6k stars, 267 forks
  - c3: 5.8k stars, 400 forks
  when something is novel/young (not having had time to grow large and accumulate issues in the vein of "1 doc page out of 1000 is worded incorrectly") and (as of yet) niche (innate barrier to entry for contribution because you have to learn from square 1 what all the moving parts look like), you don't see the same activity patterns on public source hosts as with a general-purpose language.
  1. plastic041 · 1789696816 · focus · HN ↗
    About forks alone I get it, but look at their issues.
    - fstar: 2K issues, stars-issue ratio: 0.6.
    - coalton: 700 issues, ratio: 0.4
    - carp: 450 issues, ratio: 0.08
    - c3: 1.9K issues. ratio: 0.3
    Bend has 300 issues for 20K stars so ratio is about 0.02. Maybe their followers starred the repo as a fan activity? It could explain too many stars and too few forks/issues/prs.
    debo_ · 1789698894 · focus · HN ↗
    This obsession over GitHub stars is quite bizarre.

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