Feedback for next jam

[sophiajt]

Please comment below with:

• things you liked about this jam
• things you hope are better with the next jam

[sumeet]

• things you liked about this jam

1. SO MUCH HYPE, y'all (y'one?) did a great job of marketing this. a lot of participation too.
2. discord server contributed to hype and can chat with other jammers and JT
3. enough notice to plan for the weekend
4. beautiful theme
5. it was just so fun

• things you hope are better with the next jam

1. wish it was easier to see other people's projects. i don't have an immediate suggestion here, browsing through the project folders on github was rough because you have to click through a lot of projects, and you have to weed out empties. a scrollable interface for looking through projects might be better
2. 12 or 24 more hours would have been golden. i'm in california so the jam was from fri 11am to sun 11am. on friday, i spent several hours thinking about the theme, and just started implementing something not knowing what my actual idea was. when i woke up on saturday morning, the theme had enough time to click and in idea i liked. then i pulled an all-nighter getting everything ready. with a bit more time, i could have slept and then maybe had another morning-inspiration moment to build on the idea even more.
3. at the end of the jam, the atmosphere felt like people really wanted to show off their work (understandably so) though i felt less curiosity from others about other people's work. this might be related to point 1. from above, not being easy to browse the projects
4. i would prefer more structure in the voting system, as someone who worked very hard on the project and intentionally didn't try to promote the project in the discord. the project and the presentation in the readme all done before the submission deadline should speak for themselves. or maybe even have a panel that at least tried all of the projects. it will be difficult to look at all of the projects (or even know if people saw mine or not) and then track if each person voted 3 times, and also it seems like voting might not be limited to people who participated in the jam.

thank you so much for putting this together and participating, JT and everyone else ❤️

[Jackojc]

Things I liked:

• Very positive environment
• Lots of cool ideas
• We don't see a whole lot of lang-dev jams so obviously having it at all is a big one

Things I would like to see next time around:

• I think the PR system was a bit messy:
  1. Having to work around the directory structure of this repo and making sure to submit PRs in time
  2. A bit of a logistical nightmare both for maintainers and submitters in terms of reviews and being able to get your code into the repo
• A longer time limit would be nice next time around. I think 2 days is too short and maybe a week is too long. 4 days could be interesting perhaps?
• The theme was interesting but I think I would like to see something less esoteric for the next time around
• Would be worth looking into a system that would allow voters to easily view all of the submitted projects so that you get a short summary of the language (maybe an outline + example) rather than having to go through the chore of browsing every folder individually and trying to track down examples etc.
  • Maybe we could implement a kind of metadata file for everyone's entry that automatically extracts a summary, code example, team name/members and logo?

All in all, very good event and was for the most part well organized and advertised and I can't wait to see what is in store for the next time.

[vic]

Things I liked:

• Having lots of fun just thinking about an idea that checked with the theme. I loved the theme, and that it enabled creativity, and people can just focus on having fun and not something idealized like willing to create the ultimate tool in the world - we all know that's the NOR gate, right?
• Having discord to chat and find mind-kinded nerds around the globe and getting a laugh with them.
• Having short focused projects in so many langs that I'll surely checkout to see how things get done in other programming languages.
• Having a pool of crazy languages implemented in so little time :) I'll try to checkout all of them :D

Thinks that could be better next time:

• To have @EduardoRFS participating on it :D
• I'd try to sleep a bit more haha.
• So I think having a CI setup could be great, something like banning binary files (that's good since we all download the repo and I don't want unknown binaries on my system).
• Tell people to write a one-liner or simple-tiny shell script that can build their project and run test.
  This could help people reviewing to get up to speed faster (eg, a non-scala person doesn't know what my project uses to build) also it could be used for CI to check all is ok.
• Having a team (I'd be more than happy to help) to help with things like CI
• perhaps others volunteers can help people willing to learn how to write a language, but don't know if that's even possible in a Jam, since it's like build something ASAP, but also.. it's all about learning, right?

[AmrDeveloper]

Things you liked about this jam

• I loved the idea and theme
• Cool people and ideas on discord community
• The freedom to choose any language

Things you hope are better with the next jam

• You can accept some volunteers to help and guide new people if they have any issue with git or PR
• Generated GitHub page that has a list of all projects for the year and maybe sorted by vote or with badges
• Maybe we can improve voting using Github pages, for example, if each team has submitted an Image with code examples, we can generate a page at the end of the jam that shows the project name with image and if they click vote it should go to the issue URL for this team

Thanks for this event and I have really enjoyed it

[cdrini]

Things I liked:

• This hackathon was a blast!
• 2 days was spot on perfect for me. Enough to dive in and get my toes wet with something, without it being a huge commitment.
• I initially was a little irked with the prompt, because I thought it was kind of random, but eventually came to appreciate it, and think I came up with a potentially useful language feature!
• I generally don't use discord, but really enjoyed being a part of the folks chatting on this one. Made it feel like an actual event.

Things I hope were better:

• Voting is going to be tough 😅 Maybe the README needs more structure? Like a dedicated examples section? I don't have the time to try running everyone's code, but I'm super interested in the types of languages people came up with. Maybe even having a little DSL (seems fitting :D ) for the readme that can auto-run the examples, to "check" that the code works.
• Also for voting, being able to tag our languages would be nice; like "Creative", "Esoteric", "Pragmatic", etc.
• A way to showcase things would be really nice. In a physical hackathon, each team gets ~5min to present. This is too large for that, but maybe randomly grouping the teams so that each team gets 5min; and each group of teams has a 30min event of looking at other languages. These could be recorded for folks to watch later.

Overall: loved taking part, and thank you for organizing!

[AlexDikelsky]

1. I really liked this event, and having the discord server to talk about what we're doing.
2. I would have liked a bit more self-categorization of the submitted languages so we can have an easier time of trying them out.
3. I also would have liked to have optional presentations at the end, so we can see what others worked on.

The event was great! I really enjoyed working on this.

[jawadcode]

• things you liked about this jam

1. You shared a lot of resources, especially useful for those who were new to langdev
2. You announced it enough in advance to facilitate preparation
3. You setup a discord server so people could share the hype
4. Relatively well organised for your first jam

• things you hope are better with the next jam

1. As @Jackojc mentioned, a slightly less esoteric theme (also a more broad theme that could be interpreted in many ways) would be ideal.
2. You could either announce the theme a little more in advance of the competition or make the competition itself 1 or 2 days longer
3. Have an easier way to view all the projects and vote on them, perhaps a website could be built to showcase them all in a user-friendly way
4. Maybe a slightly easier way to submit your project, (for example you could make a template repo that could forked by participators and to submit you share the link to your fork on the website)
5. Not that there were any issues on the discord server but it would probably be a good idea to lay down some rules and get some moderators in future

Overall the langjam was awesome and I can't wait for the next one

[jdonszelmann]

It'd be nice to separate language name and team name more clearly as they can be different. Team names are often known before the jam starts while the language name may change. However, thanks so much for organizing this. It was amazing!

[anima-libera]

Things i liked:

• The S-tier theme.
• The duration (long enough to get something done, but at the end it feels good to rest and stop programming).
• The freedom (like the choice of the language/tools).
• The discord server!

Things that may be changed for next time:

• Forbidding @jdrprod to make me program in OCaml.
• Maybe set up some kind of online count down so that the deadline is really clear.
• Explaining what it costs to not really get the theme right or to ignore it to some extent.
• Maybe setup a feed that enables voters to scroll through pictures of example codes chosen by the teams, and that enables voters to vote for them by a simple click. That could make a lot of people quickly able to review and chose to vote or not to vote for every single submission. Well, more easily said than done..

This is more like an idea:

• Setting two deadlines: one for the implementation submission, and another one (later) for the documentation submission. I know we were supposed to manage our time, but still, that would have helped us.

[somebody1234]

Things I thought were great:

• There was an insane amount of participation, even excluding those who didn't manage to make a submission

Things I'd like to see next time:

• Some kind of warmup before the next one to let more people (especially beginners) be able to complete it. It's a lot harder to do a jam while learning how to write an interpreter/compiler - same applies with learning a new tool.
• Better organization of the Discord server? While it worked fine, the way it's currently organized is far from ideal IMO. At the very least there should be #rules and #welcome channels.
• I'd like to know how open to interpretation the theme is (preferably it should be stated in the langjam/langjam README) - I think the wording for the theme for this one leaves quite a lot to be desired. It really didn't help that both of them were words that already have meanings in programming.

Misc:

• I do hope that judging is not solely based on votes, there are more submissions than everyone can go through (myself included) so I'd imagine votes would depend heavily on how much the languages are advertised (in Discord servers, HN, IRC etc)
  • It also doesn't help that I think most of us don't want to have to install several toolchains if we want to actually run more than a few of the submissions.
• Re: Others' comments, the theme being released at competition start is fine of course, otherwise it would be too long to be a jam IMO

[vic]

Oh I got an idea, perhaps for next time we all could submit a gif, perhaps a tiny acsiinema showing how the language work (ie, running some examples) so that we can later have a page showcasing all those gifs and quickly get a grasp of the ideas, and then get a deep dive on the code of those that look interesting.

[mufeedvh]

things you liked about this jam

• I really liked the extremely random theme, a theme that no one expected, it adds up to the thrill!
• The early announcement brought in a lot of participants, that was awesome.
• Really well organized, the Discord server and the overall GitHub setup was great.
• That you started a Jam for Programming Languages. ❤️

things you hope are better with the next jam

• 48 hours are enough but with time zone differences coming into play, I think having an extra day or a total of 72 hours would've helped a lot of participants finish their work as they would be able to plan a schedule while also getting enough rest.
• More focus on the Discord server. It was all fine but having rules and moderation in the server will be required if it gets to a lot of members (in future jams). Not only that, as an extra or misc suggestion, a Discord Countdown bot (like this) would be very cool to just look at that as an open reminder. A #help channel where participants can ask doubts if they're stuck on a problem. It would also bring in more engagement.
• The browsing around part for onlookers and participants to check out each team's project and vote for it is hard as also mentioned by others above. I can suggest way to solve this, this idea just popped into my head.

Here is the idea for easier browsing of projects:

Have a separate markdown file called SUBMISSIONS.md for example, and every team should submit their "best example" or an asciinema as suggested by @vic in that file by using the <details> tag. Here is an example:

Team: One

Team One's Language Name with link to their directory

//
// example code with their language here
//

👍 Vote

Team: Two

Team Two's Language Name with link to their directory

//
// example code with their language here
//

👍 Vote

This way, onlookers or participants who vote only has to open and close to skim through each examples and also get the link to their project's directory to try it out + a direct link to vote on each. This is just my suggestion, I hope this solves that problem. :)

And again, Thank You so much for conducting this @jntrnr! ❤️🙌

[badlydrawnrod]

things you liked about the jam

• The fact that the jam existed at all was awesome, so thank you for that.
• The time frame. 48 hours over a weekend was enough to get something simple working.
• The start time. I'm sure it wasn't to everyone's taste, but many jams seem to have start times of 2am-3am in my local timezone, so it was nice to get something friendlier.
• The theme was surprising but fun, and looking at the submissions so far, it seems to have brought out a lot of creativity.

things you hope are better with the next jam

• Better publicity perhaps? I didn't know about the jam until 3-4 hours after it started.
• Maybe it could be slightly longer (another 12 hours perhaps) to accommodate time differences and allow people to work a full weekend. A 7pm start / end was great for me, but that would have been half way through the working day for some, and the middle of the night for others.

[mikey-b]

things you liked about this jam
The livestreams, loved them.

things you hope are better with the next jam
Duplicate of comment on Discord:

@jt Probably a bit late as voting has almost finished, by maybe next year, or a worthy mention this year? A category of Most Adventurous Implementation Language? @elucent has implemented his in assembly, @joking has made three versions, and I've never heard of unseemly thats used in unseemly-behaviour
[09:17]
I mean, to add to that - 30% of projects are written in rust, Statistically, I wouldn't be surprised if all winners were written in rust. Be nice to mention other languages

[asrp]

Things I liked

• How many people this event brought together. Are there groups somewhere for language designers and implementers (maybe like OS dev, but for languages)?
• Github works surprising well for organization.
  • There could be a live.md file with annoucements and updates (start, end, voting, etc).
• Kept it short to 48h, making it easier to free up the time.
• No binaries rules.
  • This could maybe be extended this to no large files, for faster repo cloning. With large files hosted externally.

Things I hope are better with the next jam

• Discord is a very closed platform. Maybe we could use Matrix or IRC or at least have a bridge to Discord? I didn't join in because of this.
• Voting. Emoji voting makes good use of Github's platform but like selects for popularity and quick reactions rather than quality.
  • At the very least, I'd like to see how many people had a look at the project. Or maybe we could all coordinate and select X projects uniformly at random to judge (on top of searching for ones that may be interesting to us).
  • Voting is actually a more difficult question. For example, I'd like to give higher weight to vote who had a more in-depth look at a project, by actually running some programs and poking around it. But don't necessarily want to penalize unusual build systems since that might also be where a lot of the innovation could come from.
  • Is there some way to highlight submissions that haven't received any attention?

Thanks for organizing this and everyone for participating! And again, I'd like ot know if there's some group for discussing making languages.