Janet

Raised as a usability problem by 15 people on Hacker News over 7 years (2019–2025), in 10 threads.

People raised many different problems with Janet, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 15 complaints

Hard to work interactively with the REPL; little IDE or Emacs support2025-07-27
Saved files land in app-specific storage other apps cannot read2025-07-27
UI hint shortcuts show up but do nothing when pressed with example config2025-05-21
PEG syntax is unwieldy and confusing to work with2024-11-27
Functions and commands appear with no example or explanation of what they do2024-11-27
Conversational style jumps around with irrelevant tangents, hard to read2023-04-13
REPL experience is pretty bad on mobile devices2023-03-31
Hard to find functions; docs are tutorial-style plus one huge unsorted list2023-03-31
Language is hard to read and doesn't make control flow clear2023-02-18
Only parentheses used, so code is harder to read than with brackets2023-02-18
Having to read and write runs of closing parens at line ends is annoying2023-02-18
Error messages are not useful when making syntax errors2021-10-14
Too much effort to get started building a desktop GUI2021-03-17
Can't find how to download or install it from the website2020-05-13
Hard to find the language by searching for its name2019-02-17