For me, the language of a project has a large impact on whether I would consider contributing to it or not. When I dislike the language, I'll usually not want to be involved with the project, but just watch it growing. Thus, it makes a project more interesting for me if the language is nice.

I know. That’s kind of true for all of us. But yet I believe this is not that important. Specially not important enough to put the language like a badge of honor beside the project’s name or description in the title, like how these “written in Go”s are.

If a projects seems interesting enough for someone, it’s more than easy to see what language is it written in. BTW, that’s how things work: you don’t decide to contribute to a project because it’s written in your favorite language. You first have to like the project itself, and if it happens to be in a language you’re comfortable with, you may contribute to it.

Your last sentence while intuitively seems true, simply isn't. There are plenty reasons some one might contribute to a project, the language could be the only reason, and that would be completely reasonable.

Example: You might not be interested in writing a text editor, but you've seen this and the lime project, both written in Go, you don't care for writing a text editor, but you might figure you could spend some time to this guy fix an issue in your free time.

Is the above a little far-fetched? Maybe, is it unrealistic? Not really.

For me the fact that Go programs don't have a runtime dependency like python or ruby makes a big difference. There are a lot of cool projects written in python or ruby which I would love to try but knowing that I have to setup rbenv/rvm/virtualenv/etc just to try it is a big inconvenience for me (or you could just install it globally for the system/user but I generally avoid that).

It's Hacker News. A community of hackers. The first thing I look at when someone shares a project is what language it's implemented in because it is interesting to see how other hackers' approaches. Having "... written in X lang" in the title just makes it easier to find projects I may have interest in.

PR seriously. Link had far less chances to get on the fromt page without PR keywords like "written in Go".

Still interesting tho.

You’re right. What makes this project interesting is the idea and the design, not Go, yet it would be much harder to get this publicity through that. And that’s exactly what I’m saying: why should people upvote just because of the language?

People can be interested in the link for two different reasons, now. Some people want to see a new editor; some people want to see the source code.

I have a search set up that emails me daily about Clojure topics on HN. I'd be very interested to see new editors written in Clojure, and not very interested in using the editors themselves.

Setting up email alerts for Clojure stories sounds useful. Can you describe how you do that? I couldn't find a way to set up alerts, either using hn.algolia.com or using Google Alerts.

You should give a try to http://hnwatcher.com, it's an alerting tool based on the HN Search API. I personally follow the "algolia" keyword -> it helped me get your question mentioning "hn.algolia.com". Enjoy ;)

This or IFTTT are the two methods I've used.

Both work well.

Thanks! I'll try hnwatcher.com for now. I emailed the creators because I didn't get a confirmation email yet, but it looks like what I was looking for.

This is the by-product of organizing ourselves by what tools we use, rather than what problem domain we immerse ourselves in.

Tools are a means to an end. Attaching anything more to them is silly.

I think you mean "it sucks that we do that" and i agree. It seems to me this is an eternal problem with our large communities. With internet everything is a large community ;)

I agree. However people new to a language might be interested in how something like that is implemented.