We need people to build joke languages because it’s essentially the next generation of language designer. They’re learning how to write a language and can work on getting better and better at it. A joke language has no reasonable expectation of being maintained. It’s essentially a throwaway open source project showing off your skills. A portfolio project.

[–] jasory@programming.dev 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

If what the original commenter said is true about simply replacing keywords with another string, then it's questionable if they are actually learning anything about language design or demonstrating skill.

[–] el_abuelo@programming.dev 2 points 6 hours ago

My first foray into doing anything remotely close to programming was substituting things in other people's TCL scripts. I had no idea what I was doing...but i was somehow getting results.

I curently have no idea how this person did this, and so as a bare minimum id have to learn that in order to know where to start replacing keywords. Maybe it's completely trivial, but the fact remains I do not know and so I would have to learn something.

So yes, even if they're "just replacing keywords" they're still learning something. Even if you consider it trivial or mundane.